Brenda Ueland - If you want to write (1938)

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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
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
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
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!

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

Brenda Ueland
To paint with oil paints for the first time... is like trying to make something exquisitely accurate and microscopically clear out of mud pies with boxing gloves on.

Brenda Ueland
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.

Brenda Ueland
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.

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

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 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.

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

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

Brenda Ueland
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.

Brenda Ueland
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.

Brenda Ueland
At last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.

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

Brenda Ueland
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.

Brenda Ueland
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.

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

Brenda Ueland