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 UELANDThe best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it.
More Brenda Ueland Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Science and vivisection make no appeal to a theological idea, much less a political one.
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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.
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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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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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It is so conceited and timid to be ashamed of one’s mistakes. Of course they are mistakes. Go on to the next.
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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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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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Don’t think of yourself as an intestinal tract and tangle of nerves in the skull, that will not work unless you drink coffee.
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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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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.
BRENDA UELAND







