Brenda Ueland Quotes

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

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.

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

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

These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas, such as: "I see where I can make an annual cut of $3.47 in my meat budget." But they have no slow, big ideas.

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.

I want to write about the great and powerful thing that listening is.

And how we forget it. And how we don't listen to our children, or those we love. And least of all - which is so important, too - to those we do not love. But we should. Because listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force...When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life.

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

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

running is the right thing to do! I am free, healthy with a good complexion.

It is that automobile addict who should be ashamed: driving in a sealed car in warmed-over carbon monoxide and smoking a seegar. I am the Goddess! He is a bug in a monkey nut!

Be bold, free, and truthful.

Your motto: Be Bold, Be Free, Be Truthful.

Everyone knows how people who laugh easily create us by their laughter,--making us think of funnier and funnier things.

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

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

We are too ready (women especially) not to stand by what we have said or done.

I found that many gifted people are so afraid of writing a poor story that they cannot summon the nerve to write a single sentence for months. The thing to say to such people is: "See how *bad* a story you can write. See how dull you can be. Go ahead. That would be fun and interesting. I will give you ten dollars if you can write something thoroughly dull from beginning to end!" And of course, no one can.

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.

I readan article by a highly educated man wherein he told with what conscientious pains he had brought up all his children tobe skeptical of everything, never to believe anything in life or religion or their own feelings without submitting it to many rational doubts, to have a persistent, thoroughly skeptical, doubting attitude toward everything.... I think he might as well have taken them out in the backyard and killed them with an ax.

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

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

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.

... the spirit, I think, is a stream, a fountain, and must be continually poured out, for only if it is poured out will more and clearer streams come.

I know that we live after death and again and again, not in the memory of our children, or as a mulch for trees and flowers, however poetic that may be, but looking passionately and egocentrically out of our eyes.

If you would shut your door against the children for an hour a day and say: 'Mother is working on her five-act tragedy in blank verse!' you would be surprised how they would respect you. They would probably all become playwrights.

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.

... when I am really alone some power seems to grow in me. ... Conjugality made me think of a three-legged race, where two people cannot go fast and keep tripping each other because their two legs are tied together.

vivisection is not the same thing as scientific progress.

There is such a thing as scientific progress. But this wholesale dedication of scientists to vivisection, which is the easy and cheap way, actually prevents them from scientific progress, for true progress is difficult and requires genius and imagination in its devoted workers.

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

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.

Don't always be appraising yourself, wondering if you are better or worse than other writers. "I will not Reason and Compare," said Blake; "my business is to Create." Besides, since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of Time, you are incomparable.

Duty should be a byproduct.

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.

Self-trust is so important. When you launch on a story, make your neck loose, feel free, good-natured. And be lazy. Feel that you are going to throw it away. Try writing utterly unplanned stories and see what comes out.

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

... Pour out the dull things on paper too-you can tear them up afterward-for only then do the bright ones come. If you hold back the dull things, you are certain to hold back what is clear and beautiful and true and lively.

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

It is so conceited and timid to be ashamed of one's mistakes.

Of course they are mistakes. Go on to the next.

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

Don't think of yourself as an intestinal tract and tangle of nerves in the skull, that will not work unless you drink coffee. Think of yourself as incandescent power, illuminated perhaps and forever talked to by God and his messengers.... Think if Tiffany's made a mosquito, how wonderful we would think it was!

the death of any loved parent is an incalculable lasting blow.

Because no one ever loves you again like that.

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

... the great artists ... do not want security, egoistic or materialistic.

When you will, make a resolution, set your jaw, you are expressing an imaginative fear that you won't do the thing. If you knew you would do the thing, you would smile happily and set about it. And this fear (since the imagination is always creative) comes about presently and you slide down into the complete slump of several weeks or years - the very thing you dreaded and set your jaw against.

The only way to love a person is...by listening to them and seeing and believing in the god, in the poet, in them. For by doing this, you keep the god and the poet alive and make it flourish.

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

The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny; whose attitude is: "Tell me more. Tell me all you can. I want to understand more about everything you feel and know and all the changes inside and out of you. Let more come out." And if you have no such friend,--and you want to write,--well, then you must imagine one.

If you write something and they all tell you it is bad - editors, critics, everybody - think it over and you may become convinced that they are right (though you are not to be ashamed or discouraged for a minute, but keep on writing).

Think of yourself as incandescent power, illuminated perhaps and forever talked to by God and his messengers.

If you are never satisfied with what you write, that is a good sign.

It means that your vision can see so far that it's hard to come up to it. Again I say - the only unfortunate people are the glib ones, immediately satisfied with their work. To them, the ocean is only knee-deep.

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