It is so conceited and timid to be ashamed of one’s mistakes. Of course they are mistakes. Go on to the next.
BRENDA UELANDthe only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.
More Brenda Ueland Quotes
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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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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.
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I want to understand more about everything you feel and know and all the changes inside and out of you. Let more come out.” And if you have no such friend,–and you want to write,–well, then you must imagine one.
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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 can argue with a theologian or a politician, but doctors are sacrosanct. They know; you do not. Science has its mystique much more powerful than any religion active today.
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Inspiration does not come like a blot, nor is it kinetic energy striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly all the time.
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And this fear (since the imagination is always creative) comes about presently and you slide down into the complete slump of several weeks or years – the very thing you dreaded and set your jaw against.
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They 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.
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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.
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The best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it.
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we like fixed rules because that ends thinking and we can rest. But there is no resting place down here.
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These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas, such as: “I see where I can make an annual cut of $3.47 in my meat budget.” But they have no slow, big ideas.
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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.
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Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his *true* self and not from the self he thinks he *should* be.
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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.
BRENDA UELAND