Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
...writing is not a performance but a generosity.
Brenda Ueland
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Brenda Ueland
Age: 93 †
Born: 1891
Born: October 24
Died: 1985
Died: March 5
Journalist
Performances
Writing
Generosity
Performance
More quotes by Brenda Ueland
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.
Brenda Ueland
We start out in our lives as little children, full of light and the clearest vision.
Brenda Ueland
Inspiration does not come like a blot, nor is it kinetic energy striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly all the time.
Brenda Ueland
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
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
Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.
Brenda Ueland
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
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
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
You must become aware of the richness in you and come to believe in it and know it is there, so that you can write opulently and with self-trust. If you once become aware of it and have faith in it, you will be all right.
Brenda Ueland
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
The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
Brenda Ueland
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
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
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.
Brenda Ueland
Self-trust is so important. When you launch on a story, make your neck loose, feel free, good-natured. And be lazy. Feel that you are going to throw it away. Try writing utterly unplanned stories and see what comes out.
Brenda Ueland
Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.
Brenda Ueland
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
You have to hold your audience in writing to the very end-much more than in talking, when people have to be polite and listen to you.
Brenda Ueland
Who are the people, for example, to whom you go for advice? Not to the hard, practical ones who can tell you exactly what to do, but to the listeners that is, the kindest, least censorious, least bossy people you know. It is because by pouring out your problem to them, you then know what to do about it yourself.
Brenda Ueland