Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Brenda Ueland
Age: 93 †
Born: 1891
Born: October 24
Died: 1985
Died: March 5
Journalist
Listen
Hold
Audience
Talking
Ends
Writing
Much
People
Polite

More quotes by 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
If you write, good ideas must come welling up into you so that you have something to write. If good ideas do not come at once, or for a long time, do not be troubled at all. Wait for them. Put down little ideas no matter how insignificant they are. But do not feel, any more, guilty about idleness and solitude.
Brenda Ueland
Image
If you would shut your door against the children for an hour a day and say: 'Mother is working on her five-act tragedy in blank verse!' you would be surprised how they would respect you. They would probably all become playwrights.
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
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
Image
We are always afraid to start something that we want to make very good, true, and serious.
Brenda Ueland
Image
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.
Brenda Ueland
Image
Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.
Brenda Ueland
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Think of yourself as incandescent power, illuminated perhaps and forever talked to by God and his messengers.
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
Consistency is the horror of the world.
Brenda Ueland
Image
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
Image
Be bold, free, and truthful.
Brenda Ueland
Image
Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.
Brenda Ueland
Image
People who try to boss themselves always want (however kindly) to boss other people. They always think they know best and are so stern and resolute about it they are not very open to new and better ideas.
Brenda Ueland
Image
We start out in our lives as little children, full of light and the clearest vision.
Brenda Ueland
Image
Write a true, careless, slovenly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life.
Brenda Ueland