Quotes from Dorothea Brande

To guarantee success, act as if it were impossible to fail.

Fiction supplies the only philosophy that may readers know; it establishes their ethical, social, and material standards; it confirms them in their prejudices or opens their minds to a wider world.

Act as if it were impossible to fail.

Old habits are strong and jealous.

Man's mind is not a container to be filled but rather a fire to be kindled.

By going over your day in imagination before you begin it, you can begin acting successfully at any moment.

A problem clearly stated is a problem half solved.

Envisioning the end is enough to put the means in motion.

So long as new ideas are created, sales will continue to reach new highs.

The most enviable writers are those who, quite often unanalytically and unconsciously, have realized that there are different facets to their nature and are able to live and work with now one, now another, in the ascendant.

The Wright brothers flew through the smoke screen of impossibility.

There are seeds of self-destruction in all of us that will bare only unhappiness if allowed to grow.

Success, for any sane adult, is exactly equivalent to doing one's best. What that best may be, what its farthest reaches may include, we can discover only by freeing ourselves completely from the Will to Fail.

For the root of genius is in the unconscious, not the conscious, mind. It is not by weighing, balancing, trimming, expanding with conscious intention, that an excellent piece of art is born. It takes its shape and has its origin outside the region of the conscious intellect. There is much that the conscious can do, but it cannot provide you with genius, or with the talent that is genius' second cousin.

And, beside the innumerable purely subjective advantages, there are the rich objective rewards. A dream-picture brings no buyer, a dream-plan no dividends, a fantasied book is followed by no royalty statements. Crass as this may sound in a world which spends a great deal of its breath in persuading futilitarians that they have chosen the better part, it is the literal truth and stands for a truth still greater.

The importance of novels and short stories in our society is great. Fiction supplies the only philosophy that many readers know; it establishes their ethical, social, and material standards; it confirms them in their prejudices or opens their minds to a wider world. The movies have not undermined the influence of fiction. On the contrary, they have extended its field, carrying the ideas which are already current among reader to those too young, too impatient, or too uneducated to read.

But notice that where you must do work not your own, assume these responsibilities; see that you do not allow them to be thrust upon you. What you undertake open-eyed will seldom be made later a cause of martyrdom and sullenness.

If someone else does excellently in the line you had dreamed of for yourself, you can always believe that, if you had really tried again, you could have surpassed him.

The best way to do this is to rise half an hour, or a full hour, earlier than you customarily rise. Just as soon as you can—and without talking, without reading the morning's paper, without picking up the book you laid aside the night before—begin to write. Write anything that comes into your head:

All vital persons are the target of the curiosity of those who are not vital; but the few whose opinions concern you will know the truth, and the others are of no importance. Yet many withdraw from active life, not to take up an intenser inner life, but merely to avoid the vulgar curiosity of the crowd.

As long as you cannot bear the notion that there is a creature under heaven who can regard you with an indifferent, an amused or hostile eye, you will probably see to it that you continue to fail with the utmost charm.

If you are unwilling to write from the honest, though perhaps far from the final, point of view that represents your present state, you may come to your deathbed with your contribution to the world still unmade, and just as far from final conviction about the universe as you were at the age of twenty.

You can write about anything which has been vivid enough to cause you to comment upon it." If a situation has caught your attention to that extent, it has meaning for you, and if you can find what that meaning is, you have the basis for a story.

Always your first question to yourself should be, "What would I be doing now if it were really impossible for me to fall at – whatever it is: traveling, modeling, writing, farming?