Brenda Ueland Quotes

65 Sourced Quotes

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

Brenda Ueland
Families are great murderers of the creative impulse, particularly husbands.

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

Brenda Ueland
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.

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

Brenda Ueland
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.

Brenda Ueland
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.

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

Brenda Ueland
The only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.

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

Brenda Ueland
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.

Brenda Ueland
Now some people when they sit down to write and nothing special comes, no good ideas, are so frightened that they drink a lot of strong coffee to hurry them up, or smoke packages of cigarettes, or take drugs or get drunk. They do not know that ideas come slowly, and that the more clear, tranquil and unstimulated you are, the slower the ideas come, but the better they are.

Brenda Ueland
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).

Brenda Ueland
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.

Brenda Ueland
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.

Brenda Ueland
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.

Brenda Ueland
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!

Brenda Ueland
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. You can see that when you think how the friends that really listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius as though it did us good, like ultraviolet rays.

Brenda Ueland
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.

Brenda Ueland
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.

Brenda Ueland
Children are so afraid of us because they know we may try to keep them from making their biggest and most important mistakes.

Brenda Ueland
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.

Brenda Ueland
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.

Brenda Ueland
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.

Brenda Ueland
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.

Brenda Ueland