I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.
Mindful meditation has been discovered to foster the ability to inhibit those very quick emotional impulses.
There is no shame in impulse.
The desire to be liked is acceptable in real life but very problematic in fiction. Pleasantness is the enemy of good fiction. I try to write on the premise that no one is going to read my work. Because there's this terrible impulse to grovel before the reader, to make them like you, to write with the reader in mind in that way. It prevents you doing work that is ugly or upsetting or difficult. The temptation is to not be true to what you want to write and to be considerate or amusing instead. I'm always trying to fight against the impulse to make my readers like me.
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
The great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. And great things are not something accidental, but must certainly be willed.
Never resist a generous impulse.
In the documentary impulse, two species of 'fact' exist side by side: one is coolly objective and the other is fraught, diverse and emotive; one figurative, the other abstract; one prosaic, the other poetic; one factual, the other romantic.
If I like it, I'll buy it; pure impulse shopping.
The sense of inferiority inherent in the act of imitation breeds resentment. The impulse of the imitators is to overcome the model they imitate.
It is well to be alone. It fertilizes the creative impulse.
Trust your instincts. If you have no instincts, trust your impulses.
Nature, who for the perfect maintenance of the laws of her general equilibrium, has sometimes need of vices and sometimes of virtues, inspires now this impulse, now that one, in accordance with what she requires.
Where one person shapes their life by precept and example, there are a thousand who have shaped it by impulse and circumstances.
The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one's individual distinctness in a compact collective whole.
I felt a lot of ambivalence about going back to graduate school for a second MFA. The impulse was really the opposite from what it had been more than a decade before: I wanted to interrupt a career.
If your hunch proves a good one, you were inspired; if it proves bad, you are guilty of yielding to thoughtless impulse.
The impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty.
Hence, in desiring, the more the enjoyment is delayed, the more fancy begins to weave about the object images of future fruition, and to clothe the desired object with properties calculated to inflame the impulse.
Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.