About Brenda Ueland: Brenda Ueland is best known for her book If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit.
But the great artists like Michelangelo and Blake and Tolstoi--like Christ whom Blake called an artist because he had one of the most creative imaginations that ever was on earth--do not want security, egoistic or materialistic. Why, it never occurs ...
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.
...the best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it. And what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it, i.e., share it with others?
(about William Blake) As for Blake's happiness--a man who knew him said: "If asked whether I ever knew among the intellectual, a happy man, Blake would be the only one who would immediately occur to me." And yet this creative power in Blake did not c...
Don't always be appraising yourself, wondering if you are better or worse than other writers. "I will not Reason and Compare," said Blake; "my business is to Create." Besides, since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of Time...
Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.
At least I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them if they cared to hear it.
Yes, 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 pu...
Of course, in fairness, I must remind you of this: that we writers are the most lily-livered of all craftsmen. We expect more, for the most peewee efforts, than any other people.
Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.
The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny; whose attitude is: "Tell me more. Tell me all you can. I want to understand more about everything you feel and know...
Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius." The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it eve...
Everyone knows how people who laugh easily create us by their laughter,--making us think of funnier and funnier things.
I want to assure you with all earnestness, that 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. It h...
...at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.
...writing is not a performance but a generosity.
Families are great murderers of the creative impulse, particularly husbands.
Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.
I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.
It is so conceited and timid to be ashamed of one's mistakes. Of course they are mistakes. Go on to the next.
