Life & Wisdom Quote by Rita Mae Brown

Brown’s line reads like a pep talk, but it’s really a discipline manifesto in friendly clothing. “Creativity comes from trust” flips the usual mythology: inspiration isn’t lightning, it’s a relationship you build with your own judgment. The subtext is craft-based and quietly political. Brown came up in a literary culture that could be dismissive of women’s voices and of lesbian writers in particular; “trust your instincts” is not airy self-help so much as a refusal to outsource authority to gatekeepers, workshops, or whatever version of “proper” is currently trending.

The second sentence pushes against a modern kind of creative paralysis: overthinking as virtue. Instinct, for Brown, isn’t whim. It’s the accrued intelligence of attention, reading, living, revision, failure - all the unglamorous inputs that eventually feel like intuition. She’s telling you to listen to that signal before it gets drowned out by performance anxiety.

Then comes the hard corrective: “never hope more than you work.” Hope here is treated as a seductive substitute for labor, the way aspiring artists can romanticize being discovered, validated, or finally “ready.” Brown punctures that fantasy without becoming cynical. She doesn’t ban hope; she caps it. The balance is the point: trust yourself enough to begin, and respect the work enough to keep going. It’s an ethic of agency disguised as encouragement - creativity as something you earn by showing up.