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 UELANDThe 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.
More Brenda Ueland Quotes
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Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.
BRENDA UELAND -
the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.
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Your motto: Be Bold, Be Free, Be Truthful.
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 -
Be bold, free, and truthful.
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 -
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.
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But the great artists like Michelangelo and Blake and Tolstoi–like Christ whom Blake called an artist because he had one of the most creative imaginations that ever was on earth–do not want security, egoistic or materialistic. Why, it never occurs to them.
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 -
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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But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible–villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word
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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.
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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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Orthodox criticism … is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented, having the most imagination and sympathy, these are the first ones to get killed off.
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I know that we live after death and again and again, not in the memory of our children, or as a mulch for trees and flowers, however poetic that may be, but looking passionately and egocentrically out of our eyes.
BRENDA UELAND







