Top 104 Quotes & Sayings by Brenda Ueland - Page 2

Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius." The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up. 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

It is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come.

When we commit ourselves to writing for some part of each day, we are happier, more enlightened, alive, light-hearted and generous to everyone else. Even our health improves.

Consistency is the horror of the world.

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.

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. 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.

Know that it is good to work. Work with love and think of liking it when you do it.

...writing is not a performance but a generosity.

We should all know this: that listening, not talking, is the gifted and great role, and the imaginative role.

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.

Orthodox criticism ... is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented, having the most imagination and sympathy, these are the first ones to get killed off.

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.

The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny.

We are too ready (women especially) not to stand by what we have said or done.

Who are the people, for example, to whom you go for advice? Not to the hard, practical ones who can tell you exactly what to do, but to the listeners; that is, the kindest, least censorious, least bossy people you know. It is because by pouring out your problem to them, you then know what to do about it yourself.

... the great artists ... do not want security, egoistic or materialistic.

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.

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.

People who try to boss themselves always want (however kindly) to boss other people. They always think they know best and are so stern and resolute about it they are not very open to new and better ideas.

vivisection is not the same thing as scientific progress. There is such a thing as scientific progress. But this wholesale dedication of scientists to vivisection, which is the easy and cheap way, actually prevents them from scientific progress, for true progress is difficult and requires genius and imagination in its devoted workers.

Don't think of yourself as an intestinal tract and tangle of nerves in the skull, that will not work unless you drink coffee. 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!

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.

Science and vivisection make no appeal to a theological idea, much less a political one. 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.

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.

Self-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.

I hate orthodox criticism. I don't mean great criticism, like that of Matthew Arnold and others, but the usual small niggling, fussy-mussy criticism, which thinks it can improve people by telling them where they are wrong, and results only in putting them in straitjackets of hesitancy and self-consciousness, and weazening all vision and bravery.

We start out in our lives as little children, full of light and the clearest vision.

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.

The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny; whose attitude is: "Tell me more. Tell me all you can. 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.

If you write something and they all tell you it is bad - editors, critics, everybody - think it over and you may become convinced that they are right (though you are not to be ashamed or discouraged for a minute, but keep on 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.

Inspiration does not come like a blot, nor is it kinetic energy striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly all the time.

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. 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. 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.

If only I had a wife!" I used to think, "who could stay home and keep the children happy, why I could support six of them. A cinch.

We have come to think that duty should come first. I disagree. Duty should be a by-product. Writing, the creative effort, the use of the imagination, should come first – at least, for some part of every day of your life. It is a wonderful blessing if you use it. You will become happier, more enlightened, alive, impassioned, light-hearted and generous to everybody else. Even your health will improve. Colds will disappear and all the other ailments of discouragement and boredom.

running is the right thing to do! I am free, healthy with a good complexion. It is that automobile addict who should be ashamed: driving in a sealed car in warmed-over carbon monoxide and smoking a seegar. I am the Goddess! He is a bug in a monkey nut!

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.

... to paint with oil paints for the first time ... is like trying to make something exquisitely accurate and microscopically clear out of mud pies with boxing gloves on.

it is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come. ... Pour out the dull things on paper too-you can tear them up afterward-for only then do the bright ones come. If you hold back the dull things, you are certain to hold back what is clear and beautiful and true and lively.

And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective and learns more and does more good

... 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.

Know that it is good to work. Work with love, and think of liking it when you do it. It is easy and interesting. It is a privilege. There is nothing hard about it but your anxious vanity and fear of failure.

The true self is always in motion like music, a river of life, changing, moving, failing, suffering, learning, shining. That is why you must freely and recklessly make new mistakes - in writing or in life - and do not fret about them but pass on and write more.

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.