Quotes from Brenda Ueland

Families are great murderers of the creative impulse, particularly husbands.

Think of yourself as incandescent power, illuminated perhaps and forever talked to by God and his messengers.

When we commit ourselves to writing for some part of each day, we are happier, more enlightened, alive, light-hearted and generous to everyone else. Even our health improves.

Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.

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

Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers.

No writing is a waste of time – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good.

Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.

The true self is always in motion like music, a river of life, changing, moving, failing, suffering, learning, shining.

Write a true, careless, slovenly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life.

Even if I knew for certain that I would never have anything published again, and would never make another cent from it, I would still keep on writing.

This is what I learned: that everybody is talented, original and has something important to say.

Since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of time, you are incomparable.

It is so conceited and timid to be ashamed of one's mistakes. Of course they are mistakes. Go on to the next.

... 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.

You know, I have come to think listening is love, that's what it really is.

The tragedy of bold, forthright, industrious people is that they act so continuously without much thinking, that it becomes dry and empty.

We are always afraid to start something that we want to make very good, true, and serious.

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.

So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

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.

Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.

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

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.