Since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of time, you are incomparable.
— Brenda Ueland
The most competitive Brenda Ueland quotes you will be delighted to read
Why should we all use our creative power.
...? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money.
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.
I learned...that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force.
When we really listen to people there is an alternating current, and this recharges us so that we never get tired of each other. We are constantly being re-created.
The tragedy of bold, forthright, industrious people is that they act so continuously without much thinking, that it becomes dry and empty.
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 death of any loved parent is an incalculable lasting blow.
Because no one ever loves you again like that.
Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.
Writing is the action of thinking, just as drawing is the action of seeing and composing music is the action of hearing.
In true courage there is always an element of choice, of an ethical choice, and of anguish, and also of action and deed. There is always a flame of spirit in it, a vision of some necessity higher than oneself.
Creative power flourishes only when I am living in the present.
The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
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.
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!
...writing is not a performance but a generosity.
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.
Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.
It is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come.
It is so conceited and timid to be ashamed of one's mistakes.
Of course they are mistakes. Go on to the next.
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!
Consistency is the horror of the world.
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.
Write a true, careless, slovenly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life.
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.
Orthodox criticism ... is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented, having the most imagination and sympathy, these are the first ones to get killed off.
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.
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.
You can write anything you want to,--a six-act blank verse, symbolic tragedy or a vulgar short, short story. Just so that you write it with honesty and gusto, and do not try to make somebody believe that you are smarter than you are. What's the use? You can never be smarter than you are.
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.
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.
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.
The true self is always in motion like music, a river of life, changing, moving, failing, suffering, learning, shining. That is why you must freely and recklessly make new mistakes - in writing or in life - and do not fret about them but pass on and write more.
You must become aware of the richness in you and come to believe in it and know it is there, so that you can write opulently and with self-trust. If you once become aware of it and have faith in it, you will be all right.
Who are the people, for example, to whom you go for advice? Not to the hard, practical ones who can tell you exactly what to do, but to the listeners; that is, the kindest, least censorious, least bossy people you know. It is because by pouring out your problem to them, you then know what to do about it yourself.
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 only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny.
If you write, good ideas must come welling up into you so that you have something to write. If good ideas do not come at once, or for a long time, do not be troubled at all. Wait for them. Put down little ideas no matter how insignificant they are. But do not feel, any more, guilty about idleness and solitude.
Know that it is good to work. Work with love and think of liking it when you do it.
We should all know this: that listening, not talking, is the gifted and great role, and the imaginative role.
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.
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 comes to us slowly and quietly . prime it with a little solitude.
I hate orthodox criticism. I don't mean great criticism, like that of Matthew Arnold and others, but the usual small niggling, fussy-mussy criticism, which thinks it can improve people by telling them where they are wrong, and results only in putting them in straitjackets of hesitancy and self-consciousness, and weazening all vision and bravery.
...at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.
People who try to boss themselves always want (however kindly) to boss other people. They always think they know best and are so stern and resolute about it they are not very open to new and better ideas.
everyone who is human has something to express.
Try not expressing yourself for twenty-four hours and see what happens. You will nearly burst. You will want to write a long letter, or draw a picture, or sing, or make a dress or a garden.
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.
