Brenda Ueland (1891–1985) was an American journalist, editor, freelance writer, and writing teacher. She is best known for her book If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit (1938.)
Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Ueland received her baccalaureate from Barnard College of Columbia University in 1913. Ueland had a varied and prolific career. She freelanced for many publications, including the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, Golfer and Sportsman, and various newspapers. She was a staff writer for Liberty and the Minneapolis Times, among other publications. She also served as an editor 1915–17 for Crowell Publishing in New York City.
Ueland wrote scripts for radio shows such as Tell Me More and Stories for Girl Heroes. She also taught many local writing classes starting in 1934.
Ueland published two books during her life. If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit (1938,) about her philosophies on writing and life in general, and the autobiography entitled Me: A Memoir (1939.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Brenda Ueland
Think of yourself as an incandescent power, lluminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers.
—Brenda Ueland
Topics: God
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.
—Brenda Ueland
Topics: Listening
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.
—Brenda Ueland
Topics: To Be Born Everyday, Solitude, Creativity, One Step at a Time, Instincts
everyone who is human has something to express. Try not expressing yourself for twenty-four hours and see what happens. You will nearly burst. You will want to write a long letter, or draw a picture, or sing, or make a dress or a garden.
—Brenda Ueland
Topics: Humanity, Communication
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.
—Brenda Ueland
Topics: Ideas, Thinking
We start out in our lives as little children, full of light and the clearest vision.
—Brenda Ueland
Topics: Vision
It is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come.
—Brenda Ueland
Topics: Communication
So you see, imagination needs coddling—long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
—Brenda Ueland
Topics: Imagination
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.
—Brenda Ueland
Topics: Writing
The only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.
—Brenda Ueland
Topics: Writing
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. You can see that when you think how the friends that really listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius as though it did us good, like ultraviolet rays.
—Brenda Ueland
Topics: Listening
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