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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

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

Express Human Talent
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
I found that many gifted people are so afraid of writing a poor story that they cannot summon the nerve to write a single sentence for months.
BRENDA UELAND

Fun People Writing
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

Against Complete Deaaded Presently
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

Imporatnt Least Listened Strange
And it is why all the bright women of the world, who if more were expected of them, might do important work, but who instead have a chronic feeling of ineffectiveness and sloth.
BRENDA UELAND

Ineffectiveness Instead might Sloth Women
The only way to love a person is…by listening to them and seeing and believing in the god, in the poet, in them. For by doing this, you keep the god and the poet alive and make it flourish.
BRENDA UELAND

Alive Believe Listening
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

Art Go Letting Mistake
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.
BRENDA UELAND

Horse Jobs Morning
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.
BRENDA UELAND

Children Enemies Friends Husband
Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.
BRENDA UELAND

Creative Husband Murderer
Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.
BRENDA UELAND

Sometimes Thinking Two
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
Write a true, careless, slovenly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life.
BRENDA UELAND

Diaries Honest Writing
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

People Talking Writing

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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