You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.

That is so lyrical and poetic:

The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947 is brimming with such poetic yet practical sagacity on the creative life and is a beautiful addition to other famous advice on writing like Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 rules for a great story, David Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Miller’s 11 commandments, Jack Kerouac’s 30 beliefs and techniques, John Steinbeck’s 6 pointers, and Susan Sontag’s synthesized learnings.

More Anais Nin:

http://pandawhale.com/post/3220/the-secret-of-joy-is-the-mastery-of-pain-anais-nin

http://pandawhale.com/post/30304/we-dont-see-things-as-they-are-we-see-them-as-we-are-anais-nin

With all the noise out there today, I believe one has to do this in order to shine through.

Master pain? See things as we are?

Oh! Not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings.

Yes. You are correct, sir.

More Anais Nin on anxiety:

http://pandawhale.com/post/38283/the-culture-and-costs-of-anxiety-brain-pickings