Brenda Ueland Quotes

Since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of time, you are incomparable.

This is what I learned: that everybody is talented, original and has something important to say.

I will tell you what I have learned myself. For me, a long five or six mile walk helps. And one must go alone and every day.

Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.

When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life.

We are always afraid to start something that we want to make very good, true, and serious.

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.

The tragedy of bold, forthright, industrious people is that they act so continuously without much thinking, that it becomes dry and empty.

Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.

No writing is a waste of time – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good.

Inspiration comes to us slowly and quietly . prime it with a little solitude.

Writing is the action of thinking, just as drawing is the action of seeing and composing music is the action of hearing.

the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.

The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

Creative power flourishes only when I am living in the present.

The best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it.

...writing is not a performance but a generosity.

Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.

Advertising companies hire the very brightest, wittiest young people to write for them. Not one single sentence of it is worth repeating. Why? Because it wasn't meant.

The true self is always in motion like music, a river of life, changing, moving, failing, suffering, learning, shining.

Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.

It is so conceited and timid to be ashamed of one's mistakes. Of course they are mistakes. Go on to the next.

Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his *true* self and not from the self he thinks he *should* be.

It is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come.

Write a true, careless, slovenly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life.

Even if I knew for certain that I would never have anything published again, and would never make another cent from it, I would still keep on writing.

We are always doing something, talking, reading, listening to the radio, planning what next. The mind is kept naggingly busy on some easy, unimportant external thing all day.

If I did not wear torn pants, orthopedic shoes, frantic disheveled hair, that is to say, if I did not tone down my beauty, people would go mad. Married men would run amuck.

All children have creative power.

Consistency is the horror of the world.

The writer has a feeling and utters it from his true self. The reader reads it and is immediately infected and has exactly the same feeling. This is the whole secret of enchantment and fascination.

...at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.

You know, I have come to think listening is love, that's what it really is.

it is when you are really living in the present-working, thinking, lost, absorbed in something you care about very much, that you are living spiritually.

And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective and learns more and does more good

So remember these two things: you are talented and you are original. Be sure of that. I say this because self-trust is one of the very most important things in writing.

When we commit ourselves to writing for some part of each day, we are happier, more enlightened, alive, light-hearted and generous to everyone else. Even our health improves.

Be bold, free, and truthful.

Try to discover your true, honest, untheoretical self.

we like fixed rules because that ends thinking and we can rest. But there is no resting place down here.

Of course, in fairness, I must remind you of this: that we writers are the most lily-livered of all craftsmen. We expect more, for the most peewee efforts, than any other people.

You have to hold your audience in writing to the very end-much more than in talking, when people have to be polite and listen to you.

You Do Not Know Is in You— an Inexhaustible Fountain of Ideas. Another reason for writing a diary is to discover that the ideas in you are an inexhaustible fountain.

If only I had a wife!" I used to think, "who could stay home and keep the children happy, why I could support six of them. A cinch.

Inspiration does not come like a blot, nor is it kinetic energy striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly all the time.

We should all know this: that listening, not talking, is the gifted and great role, and the imaginative role.

If we don't act at all (express our imaginings either in work or a changing personality, so that we can learn and think again something better) we certainly rot.

We start out in our lives as little children, full of light and the clearest vision.

There is that American pastime known as "kidding" - with the result that everyone is ashamed and hangdog about showing the slightest enthusiasm or passion or sincere feeling about anything.

The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny.