… the great artists … do not want security, egoistic or materialistic.
BRENDA UELANDCreative power flourishes only when I am living in the present.
More Brenda Ueland Quotes
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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 -
Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.
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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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Since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of time, you are incomparable.
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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.
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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.
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Try to discover your true, honest, untheoretical self.
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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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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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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!
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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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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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Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.
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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 must become aware of the richness in you and come to believe in it and know it is there, so that you can write opulently and with self-trust. If you once become aware of it and have faith in it, you will be all right.
BRENDA UELAND