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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.

Brenda Ueland

Inspiration does not come like a blot, nor is it kinetic energy striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly all the time.
BRENDA UELAND

Energy Inspiration Time
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
Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.
BRENDA UELAND

Love Talking Three You
Creative power flourishes only when I am living in the present.
BRENDA UELAND

Creative Creative Power Live Present
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.
BRENDA UELAND

Advertising People Writing
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.
BRENDA UELAND

Listening People Tired
Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.
BRENDA UELAND

Express Human Talent
… the great artists … do not want security, egoistic or materialistic.
BRENDA UELAND

Artist Materialistic Want
The 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.
BRENDA UELAND

Feelings Secret Self
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

Incandescent Messenger Think Yourself
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
Science and vivisection make no appeal to a theological idea, much less a political one.
BRENDA UELAND

Animal Powerful Science
If we don’t act at all (express our imaginings either in work or a changing personality, so that we can learn and think again something better) we certainly rot.
BRENDA UELAND

Change Thinking Work
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.
BRENDA UELAND

Effort Lilies People
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

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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