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 UELANDSelf-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.
More Brenda Ueland Quotes
-
-
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.
BRENDA UELAND -
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.
BRENDA UELAND -
The best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it.
BRENDA UELAND -
When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life.
BRENDA UELAND -
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.
BRENDA UELAND -
It is so conceited and timid to be ashamed of one’s mistakes. Of course they are mistakes. Go on to the next.
BRENDA UELAND -
… when I am really alone some power seems to grow in me. … Conjugality made me think of a three-legged race, where two people cannot go fast and keep tripping each other because their two legs are tied together.
BRENDA UELAND -
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.
BRENDA UELAND -
Be bold, free, and truthful.
BRENDA UELAND -
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 -
You know, I have come to think listening is love, that’s what it really is.
BRENDA UELAND -
…at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.
BRENDA UELAND -
Write a true, careless, slovenly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life.
BRENDA UELAND -
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.
BRENDA UELAND -
The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny.
BRENDA UELAND