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
reading talking listening
We are always doing something, talking, reading, listening to the radio, planning what next. The mind is kept naggingly busy on some easy, unimportant external thing all day.
inspiration solitude littles
Inspiration comes to us slowly and quietly . prime it with a little solitude.
writing people feelings
...at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.
trying way best-way
The best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it.
children creative creative-power
All children have creative power.
thinking self speak
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.
creativity streams
It is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come.
talent humans
Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.
children creativity writing
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.
hate mean thinking
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.
consistency world routine
Consistency is the horror of the world.
peace artist people
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. "Be not anxious for the morrow," and "which of you being anxious can add one cubit to his stature?" So they dare to be idle, i.e. not to be pressed and duty-driven all the time. They dare to love people even when they are very bad, and they dare not to try and dominate others to show them what they must do for their own good.
years imagination creative
When you will, make a resolution, set your jaw, you are expressing an imaginative fear that you won't do the thing. If you knew you would do the thing, you would smile happily and set about it. 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.
writing way better-person
the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.