…Describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty—describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds–wouldn’t you still  have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance.  And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.  -Rainer Maria Rilke

“To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.”
—Allen Ginsberg, WD

“If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.”
—Peter Handke

“I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.”
—Ray Bradbury, WD

“A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.”
—Angela Carter

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.  -Anais Nin

Don’t bend; don’t water it down; dont try to make it logical; dont edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.  -Franz Kafka

The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.  -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe