Brenda Ueland
This is what I learned: that everybody is talented, original and has something important to say.Collection: Wisdom
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.
All children have creative power.
It is so conceited and timid to be ashamed of one's mistakes. Of course they are mistakes. Go on to the next.
Families are great murderers of the creative impulse, particularly husbands.
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.
Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.
The tragedy of bold, forthright, industrious people is that they act so continuously without much thinking, that it becomes dry and empty.
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Inspiration
the death of any loved parent is an incalculable lasting blow. Because no one ever loves you again like that.Collection: Love You
When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life.Collection: Ideas
Your motto: Be Bold, Be Free, Be Truthful.Collection: Truthful
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.Collection: Thinking
Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.Collection: Talent
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.Collection: Believe
You know, I have come to think listening is love, that's what it really is.Collection: Thinking
Write a true, careless, slovenly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life.Collection: Writing
Think of yourself as incandescent power, illuminated perhaps and forever talked to by God and his messengers.Collection: Power
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."Collection: Attitude
Creative power flourishes only when I am living in the present.Collection: Creative
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.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Love You
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.Collection: Creativity
The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Wonder
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.Collection: Tired
We are always afraid to start something that we want to make very good, true, and serious.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Writing
The best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it.Collection: Trying
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.Collection: Inspirational
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!Collection: Fitness
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.Collection: Cutting
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.Collection: Writing
... the great artists ... do not want security, egoistic or materialistic.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Passion
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.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Writing
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).Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Change
We start out in our lives as little children, full of light and the clearest vision.Collection: Children
We are too ready (women especially) not to stand by what we have said or done.Collection: Done
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.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Happy
Know that it is good to work. Work with love, and think of liking it when you do it. It is easy and interesting. It is a privilege. There is nothing hard about it but your anxious vanity and fear of failure.Collection: Love
... 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.Collection: Thinking
Inspiration does not come like a blot, nor is it kinetic energy striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly all the time.Collection: Time
The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny.Collection: Teacher
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.Collection: People