Writing is the action of thinking, just as drawing is the action of seeing and composing music is the action of hearing.
BRENDA UELANDThey 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.
More Brenda Ueland Quotes
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Your motto: Be Bold, Be Free, Be Truthful.
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 -
we like fixed rules because that ends thinking and we can rest. But there is no resting place down here.
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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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You know, I have come to think listening is love, that’s what it really is.
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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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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.
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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.
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Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. When we really listen to people there is an alternating current, and this recharges us so that we never get tired of each other. We are constantly being re-created.
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And so try listening. Listen to your wife, your husband, your father, your mother, your children, your friends; to those who love you and those who don’t, to those who bore you, to your enemies. It will work a small miracle. And perhaps a great one.
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Write a true, careless, slovenly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life.
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To have the external pressure of a job removed is very astonishing. Your own will is now your only motor and it has no horse-power.
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The best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it.
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…at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.
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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!
BRENDA UELAND







