Quote

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

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Brenda Ueland
Age: 93 †
Born: 1891
Born: October 24
Died: 1985
Died: March 5
Journalist
Littles
Inspiration
Prime
Bolt
Little
Imagination
Slowly
Bolts
Come
Start
Intuition
Regularly
Must
Though
Solitude
Energetic
Giving
Chance
Strive
Flowing
Every
Comes
Creativity
Idleness
Time
Doe
Creating
Striving
Like
Give
Learned
Quietly
Kinetic

More quotes by Brenda Ueland

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Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. When we really listen to people there is an alternating current, and this recharges us so that we never get tired of each other. We are constantly being re-created.
Brenda Ueland
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Duty should be a byproduct.
Brenda Ueland
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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.
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Don't always be appraising yourself, wondering if you are better or worse than other writers. I will not Reason and Compare, said Blake my business is to Create. Besides, since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of Time, you are incomparable.
Brenda Ueland
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Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.
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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.
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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.
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Everyone knows how people who laugh easily create us by their laughter,--making us think of funnier and funnier things.
Brenda Ueland
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Why should we all use our creative power....? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money.
Brenda Ueland
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Consistency is the horror of the world.
Brenda Ueland
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You can write anything you want to,--a six-act blank verse, symbolic tragedy or a vulgar short, short story. Just so that you write it with honesty and gusto, and do not try to make somebody believe that you are smarter than you are. What's the use? You can never be smarter than you are.
Brenda Ueland
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...writing is not a performance but a generosity.
Brenda Ueland
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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
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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
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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.
Brenda Ueland
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Think of yourself as incandescent power, illuminated perhaps and forever talked to by God and his messengers.
Brenda Ueland
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We start out in our lives as little children, full of light and the clearest vision.
Brenda Ueland
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Be bold, free, and truthful.
Brenda Ueland
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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
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The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
Brenda Ueland