If You Want to Write

In a queer way you are afraid of it.7

And so now I have established reasons why you should work from now on until you die, with real love and imagination and intelligence, at your writing or whatever work it is that you care about.

I tell you this not to persuade you to give up drinking and smoking (though that might be a good thing too) but to show you that what you write today is the result of some span of idling yesterday,

For when you come to think of it, the only way to love a person is not, as the stereotyped Christian notion is, to coddle them and bring them soup when they are sick, but by listening to them and seeing and believing in the god, in the poet, in them. For by doing this, you keep the god and the poet alive and make it flourish.

Willing1 is doing something you know already, something you have been told by somebody else; there is no new imaginative understanding in it.

Now to have things alive and interesting it must be personal, it must come from the "I": what I know and feel. For that is the only great and interesting thing. That is the only truth you know, that nobody else does. Sarah McShane--

This quiet looking and thinking is the imagination; it is letting in ideas.

the Holy Ghost, or the Conscience. It is what is always searching in us and trying to free what we really think, from what we think we ought to think, from what is superimposed by bossy parents, teachers, or literary critics.

It was interlarded with what was pretentious, commonplace, and untrue.4

I have proved that you are all original and talented and need to let it out of yourselves; that is to say, you have the creative impulse. But the ardor for it is inhibited and dried up by many things; as I said, by criticism, self-doubt, duty, nervous fear that expresses itself in merely external action like running up and downstairs and scratching