"Creativity itself has its own built-in discipline, the kind that, for example in a dream, can rummage through the days of the future to find precisely the data required to make a specific point."

"With creative people strongly gifted ... [your natural self] is very prominent, no matter what you do. It therefore strongly resents any basically meaningless constraints placed about its experience. It knows, for example, how to enjoy each day, how to collect creative insights from each and every encounter, how to enrich itself physically through household chores or other activities. It dislikes being told that it must work thus and so at command of unreasonable restraints."

"You do not say to the creative self, 'Now it is 7:30. People are at their assembly lines. I am at my desk: produce.'"

"Trying to fit the great thrust of creativity into assembly-line time is in itself bound to lead to conflicts, dissatisfactions, and frustrations."

"[The author] then speaks in [his work] for all peoples, for the united psyches that overflow with thoughts and feelings that are registered by the wind, giving voice to the private, intimate, yet connected lives of men and women throughout the centuries—so that many people, listening to or reading the [author's work], hear their own inner voices also, and feel the contours of their own natures, and universal nature as well."

"[You] tried to use an assembly-line kind of time for your creative productivity. This may work when manuscripts are being typed, and so much physical labor is involved, but overall you are using the 'wrong' approach to time, particularly for any creative artist."

"Expression is a necessity of life. ... Each person feels that drive."

"There's nothing for it but to use one's abilities full blast in every area—and that that resolve and action will conquer all and set [one] free—physically, creatively, and mentally."

"Expression, rather than repression, is vital."

"With creative people ... there are always intrusions, hints or clues from ways of thinking that certainly appear foreign, and creative people use those hints and clues to construct an art, a musical composition or whatever. They sense a surge of power beneath."

"[Others'] objections should simply show you why [y]our work is so important."

"The time that any artistic creator is involved with follows earth's own time. ... The creator's time rises out of the seasons and the tides, even though in your society you make a great effort to fit the creator's time into ... assembly-line time."

"Particularly if you want to make a living at your art, you fall into the frame of mind in which you think that 'each minute is valuable'—but what you mean is that each minute must be a minute of production. But each moment must be valuable in itself, whatever you do with it."