You know, I have come to think listening is love, that’s what it really is.
BRENDA UELANDthe only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.
More Brenda Ueland Quotes
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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.
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Write a true, careless, slovenly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life.
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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.
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Think of yourself as incandescent power, illuminated perhaps and forever talked to by God and his messengers.
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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.
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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.
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Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.
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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.
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… 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.
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And least of all – which is so important, too – to those we do not love. But we should. Because listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force…When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life.
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Writing is the action of thinking, just as drawing is the action of seeing and composing music is the action of hearing.
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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.
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Your motto: Be Bold, Be Free, Be Truthful.
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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!
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The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny.
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we like fixed rules because that ends thinking and we can rest. But there is no resting place down here.
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… the great artists … do not want security, egoistic or materialistic.
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the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.
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The best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it.
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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.
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I want to understand more about everything you feel and know and all the changes inside and out of you. Let more come out.” And if you have no such friend,–and you want to write,–well, then you must imagine one.
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Since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of time, you are incomparable.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life.
BRENDA UELAND