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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Now before going to a party, I just tell myself to listen with affection to anyone who talks to me... to try to know them without my mind pressing against theirs, or arguing or changing the subject. No. My attitude is: "Tell me more. This person is showing me his soul. It is a little dry and meager and full of grinding talk just now, but presently he will begin to think, not just automatically to talk. He will show his true self. Then he will be wonderfully alive."

Creative listeners are those who want you to be recklessly yourself, even at your very worst, even vituperative, bad-tempered. They are laughing and just delighted with any manifestation of yourself, bad or good. For true listeners know that if you are bad-tempered it does not mean that you are always so. They don't love you just when you are nice; they love all of you.

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.

We should all know this: that listening is not talking; [it] is the gifted and great role and the imaginative role. And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective, and learns more and does more good. And so try listening. Listen to your wife, your husband, your father, your mother, your children, your friends; to those who love you and those who don't, to those who bore you, to your enemies. It will work a small miracle. And perhaps a great one.

But the great artists like Michelangelo and Blake and Tolstoi--like Christ whom Blake called an artist because he had one of the most creative imaginations that ever was on earth--do not want security, egoistic or materialistic. Why, it never occurs to them. "Be not anxious for the morrow," and "which of you being anxious can add one cubit to his stature?" So they dare to be idle, i.e. not to be pressed and duty-driven all the time. They dare to love people even when they are very bad, and they dare not to try and dominate others to show them what they must do for their own good.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

To have the external pressure of a job removed is very astonishing. Your own will is now your only motor and it has no horse-power. Sometimes I think that perhaps the most competent business men, and lawyers and doctors, who must be at the office at nine o'clock every morning, do not realize this and take more credit for initiative and industry than they deserve. And it is why all the bright women of the world, who if more were expected of them, might do important work, but who instead have a chronic feeling of ineffectiveness and sloth.

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 talented because everybody who is human has something to express.

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.

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.

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.

All children have creative power.

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

Consistency is the horror of the world.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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