132 Quotes by Brenda Ueland

I will tell you what I have learned myself. For me, a long five or six mile walk helps. And one must go alone and every day.

In her 93 remarkable years, Brenda Ueland published six million words. She said she had two rules she followed absolutely: to tell the truth, and not to do anything she didn’t want to do.

So remember these two things: you are talented and you are original. Be sure of that. I say this because self-trust is one of the very most important things in writing...

Inspiration comes to us slowly and quietly. prime it with a little solitude.

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.

For when you come to think of it, the only way to love a person is not, as the stereotyped Christian notion is, to coddle them and bring them soup when they are sick, but by listening to them and seeing and believing in the god, in the poet, in them. For by doing this, you keep the god and the poet alive and make it flourish.

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.

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.

The imagination needs moodling, – long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.