Brenda Ueland
Brenda Ueland
Brenda Uelandwas a journalist, editor, freelance writer, and teacher of writing. She is best known for her book If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth24 October 1891
CountryUnited States of America
children powerful writing
I want to write about the great and powerful thing that listening is. And how we forget it. And how we don't listen to our children, or those we love. 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.
writing light each-day
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.
truthful motto being-truthful
Your motto: Be Bold, Be Free, Be Truthful.
believe listening alive
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.
attitude party thinking
Now before going to a party, I just tell myself to listen with affection to anyone who talks to me... to try to know them without my mind pressing against theirs, or arguing or changing the subject. No. My attitude is: "Tell me more. This person is showing me his soul. It is a little dry and meager and full of grinding talk just now, but presently he will begin to think, not just automatically to talk. He will show his true self. Then he will be wonderfully alive."
passion thinking vanity
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.
life-changing moving rivers
The true self is always in motion like music, a river of life, changing, moving, failing, suffering, learning, shining,
thinking people tragedy
The tragedy of bold, forthright, industrious people is that they act so continuously without much thinking, that it becomes dry and empty.
teacher attitude love-you
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.
happy marriage children
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.
work thinking knows
Know that it is good to work. Work with love and think of liking it when you do it.
believe writing people
The only way to write well, so that people believe what we say and are interested or touched by it, is to slough off all pretentiousness and attitudinizing.
artist want materialistic
... the great artists ... do not want security, egoistic or materialistic.
creative live-in-the-present creative-power
Creative power flourishes only when I am living in the present.