From Henry Miller on Writing, his 11 commandments:

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.

2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to "Black Spring."
3. Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can't create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don't be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it -- but go back to it the next day. Concentrate.
Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

(via lists of note)

Also from the book:

It should be bome in mind, of course, that there is an inevitable discrepancy between the truth of the
matter and what one thinks, even about himself.
* Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery.
* I began in absolute chaos and darkness, in a bog or swamp of ideas and emotions and experiences.
* Good and bad dropped out of my vocabulary.
* I talk now about Reality, but I know there is no getting at it.
* I eschew all clear cut interpretations: with increasing simplification the mystery heightens.
* What I know tends to become more and more unstable.
* I find there is plenty of room in the world for everybody.
* One can only go forward by going backward and then sideways and then up and then down.
* My charts and plans are the slenderest sort of guides.
* Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living blissfully vrith it, in it,
through it and by it.
* Every line and word is vitally connected with my life, my life only, be it in the form of deed, event, fact,
thought, emotion, desire, evasion, frustration, dream, revery, vagary, even the unfinished nothings which
float listlessly in the brain like the snapped filaments of a spider's web.
* I had to learn to think, feel and see in a totally new fashion, in an uneducated way, in my own way,
which is the hardest thing in the world.