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.
BRENDA UELANDYou 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.
More Brenda Ueland Quotes
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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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…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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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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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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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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The best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it.
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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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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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You know, I have come to think listening is love, that’s what it really is.
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Your motto: Be Bold, Be Free, Be Truthful.
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Science and vivisection make no appeal to a theological idea, much less a political one.
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Know that it is good to work. Work with love and think of liking it when you do it.
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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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I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, – happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.
BRENDA UELAND