Dorothea Brande Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

By going over your day in imagination before you begin it, you can begin acting successfully at any moment.

Dorothea Brande
All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right-about-face which turns us from failure towards success.

Dorothea Brande
Writing calls on unused muscles and involves solitude and immobility.

Dorothea Brande
The first step to being a writer is to hitch your unconscious mind to your writing arm.

Dorothea Brande
The law of nature is: Do the thing and you shall have the power; but they who do not do the thing have not the power.

Dorothea Brande
Fiction supplies the only philosophy that many readers know; it establishes their ethical, social, and material standards; it confirms them in their prejudices or opens their minds to a wider world.

Dorothea Brande
Most of the methods of training the conscious side of the writer-the craftsman and the critic in him- are actually hostile to the good of the artist's side; and the converse of this proposition is likewise true. But it is possible to train both sides of the character to work in harmony, and the first step in that education is to consider that you must teach yourself not as though you were one person, but two.

Dorothea Brande
It is the sum of small things successfully done that lifts a life out of bondage to the humdrum.

Dorothea Brande
Most writers flourish greatly on a simple, healthy routine with occasional time off for gaiety.

Dorothea Brande
The most enviable writers are those who, quite often unanalytically and unconsciously, have realized that there are different facets to their nature and are able to live and work with now one, now the other...

Dorothea Brande
The genius keeps all his days the vividness and intensity of interest that a sensitive child feels in his expanding world.

Dorothea Brande
In the long run it makes little difference how cleverly others are deceived; if we are not doing what we are best equipped to do, or doing well what we have undertaken as our personal contribution to the world's work, at least by way of an earnestly followed avocation, there will be a core of unhappiness in our lives which will be more and more difficult to ignore as the years pass.

Dorothea Brande
Criticism and rejection are not personal insults, but your artistic component will not know that. It will quiver and wince and run to cover, and you will have trouble in luring it out again to observe and weave tales and find words for all the thousand shades of feeling that go to make up a story.

Dorothea Brande
In matching your wits against yourself you take on the shrewdest and wiliest antagonist you can have, and consequently a victorious outcome in this duel of wits brings a great feeling of triumph.

Dorothea Brande