Brenda Ueland - If you want to write (1938)

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So you see, imagination needs coddling — long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

Brenda Ueland
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.

Brenda Ueland
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.

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
The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny.

Brenda Ueland
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.

Brenda Ueland
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.

Brenda Ueland
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.

Brenda Ueland
If you would shut your door against the children for an hour a day and say: 'Mother is working on her five-act tragedy in blank verse!' you would be surprised how they would respect you. They would probably all become playwrights.

Brenda Ueland
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.

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
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