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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

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

Children Doors Mother
Sometimes I think that perhaps the most competent business men, and lawyers and doctors, who must be at the office at nine o’clock every morning, do not realize this and take more credit for initiative and industry than they deserve.
BRENDA UELAND

Credit Doctor More Morning Office Realize
Don’t think of yourself as an intestinal tract and tangle of nerves in the skull, that will not work unless you drink coffee.
BRENDA UELAND

Coffee Skulls Thinking
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

Love You Teacher Thinking
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.
BRENDA UELAND

Coffee Strong Writing
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

Enthusiasm Feelings Passion
Creative power flourishes only when I am living in the present.
BRENDA UELAND

Creative Creative Power Live Present
the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.
BRENDA UELAND

Better Person Way Writing
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
BRENDA UELAND

Believe Ordinary World
You Do Not Know Is in You- an Inexhaustible Fountain of Ideas. Another reason for writing a diary is to discover that the ideas in you are an inexhaustible fountain.
BRENDA UELAND

Fountain Ideas Knows
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

People Talking Writing
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

Artist Peace People
Creative listeners are those who want you to be recklessly yourself, even at your very worst, even vituperative, bad-tempered. They are laughing and just delighted with any manifestation of yourself, bad or good.
BRENDA UELAND

Love You Mean Nice
…at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.
BRENDA UELAND

Feelings People Writing
Know that it is good to work. Work with love and think of liking it when you do it.
BRENDA UELAND

Knows Thinking Work
Your motto: Be Bold, Be Free, Be Truthful.
BRENDA UELAND

Being Bold Motto Truthful

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).

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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).

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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