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
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.
talent humans
Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.
helping-others imagination people
Orthodox criticism ... is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented, having the most imagination and sympathy, these are the first ones to get killed off.
oil pie boxing
... to paint with oil paints for the first time ... is like trying to make something exquisitely accurate and microscopically clear out of mud pies with boxing gloves on.
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.
life-changing moving rivers
The true self is always in motion like music, a river of life, changing, moving, failing, suffering, learning, shining,
self feelings secret
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.
cutting ideas people
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.
writing self lazy
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.
work thinking knows
Know that it is good to work. Work with love and think of liking it when you do it.
faith children pain
I readan article by a highly educated man wherein he told with what conscientious pains he had brought up all his children tobe skeptical of everything, never to believe anything in life or religion or their own feelings without submitting it to many rational doubts, to have a persistent, thoroughly skeptical, doubting attitude toward everything.... I think he might as well have taken them out in the backyard and killed them with an ax.
thinking live-in-the-moment care
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.
coffee thinking skulls
Don't think of yourself as an intestinal tract and tangle of nerves in the skull, that will not work unless you drink coffee. Think of yourself as incandescent power, illuminated perhaps and forever talked to by God and his messengers.... Think if Tiffany's made a mosquito, how wonderful we would think it was!
happy marriage children
If only I had a wife!" I used to think, "who could stay home and keep the children happy, why I could support six of them. A cinch.