Brenda Ueland quotes

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another. (Brenda Ueland)

This is what I learned: that everybody is talented, original and has something important to say.

Brenda Ueland

All children have creative power.

Brenda Ueland

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

Brenda Ueland

So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

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

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

Brenda Ueland

Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.

Brenda Ueland

Since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of time, you are incomparable.

Brenda Ueland

Think of yourself as incandescent power, illuminated perhaps and forever talked to by God and his messengers.

Brenda Ueland

No writing is a waste of time – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good. (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

Even if I knew for certain that I would never have anything published again, and would never make another cent from it, I would still keep on writing.

Brenda Ueland

Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.

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

If I did not wear torn pants, orthopedic shoes, frantic disheveled hair, that is to say, if I did not tone down my beauty, people would go mad. Married men would run amuck.

Brenda Ueland

The tragedy of bold, forthright, industrious people is that they act so continuously without much thinking, that it becomes dry and empty.

Brenda Ueland

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

Brenda Ueland

Brenda Ueland

Occupation: American Writer
Born: October 24, 1891
Died: March 5, 1985
Quotes count: 18

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