Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Brenda Ueland
Age: 93 †
Born: 1891
Born: October 24
Died: 1985
Died: March 5
Journalist
Work
Learned
Every
Imagination
Something
Creative
Good
Write
Time
Feelings
Sentence
Done
Sentences
Must
Intelligence
Writing
Waste

More quotes by Brenda Ueland

Image
the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.
Brenda Ueland
Image
We should all know this: that listening, not talking, is the gifted and great role, and the imaginative role.
Brenda Ueland
Image
Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.
Brenda Ueland
Image
The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
Brenda Ueland
Image
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.
Brenda Ueland
Image
I learned...that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.
Brenda Ueland
Image
The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny.
Brenda Ueland
Image
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.
Brenda Ueland
Image
Duty should be a byproduct.
Brenda Ueland
Image
Think of yourself as incandescent power, illuminated perhaps and forever talked to by God and his messengers.
Brenda Ueland
Image
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.
Brenda Ueland
Image
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.
Brenda Ueland
Image
it is when you are really living in the present-working, thinking, lost, absorbed in something you care about very much, that you are living spiritually.
Brenda Ueland
Image
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.
Brenda Ueland
Image
The tragedy of bold, forthright, industrious people is that they act so continuously without much thinking, that it becomes dry and empty.
Brenda Ueland
Image
Write a true, careless, slovenly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life.
Brenda Ueland
Image
And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective and learns more and does more good
Brenda Ueland
Image
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
Image
We start out in our lives as little children, full of light and the clearest vision.
Brenda Ueland
Image
Inspiration comes to us slowly and quietly . prime it with a little solitude.
Brenda Ueland