Brenda Ueland Quotes

I'm not thinking when I'm writing, 'How's this going to read?' Or, 'What percentage of the audience is going to stay with me?' The thing itself is what gives me pleasure. Sometimes stuff just falls onto the page so beautifully and happily that it's deeply satisfying. It's selfish!

I like that original romance of having a pen and a legal pad and going anywhere in the world and being able to write a novel with just those two things.

I'm constantly coming up with new strategies for getting to the mental place where writing is so joyous and playful that I almost can't help putting the words down.

In the most self-protective of ways, I don't think about the reader when I'm writing - I just think about the story.

If you're actually allowing your creative part to control your writing rather than a more commercial instinct or motive, then you'll find that all sorts of interesting things will bubble up to the surface.

I write just knowing that I enjoy writing. But if I have to write, it seems like nothing comes. But when I go there for my own pleasure, the Lord might just give me loads of stuff all at once.

We have to learn not to feel guilty about letting our imagination browse around, and you know, in writing fiction particularly. But I think, in any kind of writing, we have to learn to allow ourselves to approach it in a contemplative way.

I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.

When I start to write, words have become physical presence. It was to see if I could bring that private world to life that found its first expression through reading. I really dislike the romantic notion of the artist.

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

I don't know what the secret is when I am writing it - it really is a surprise to me.

I just let the character speak to me and things appear.

I often start writing in order to excite an expansive emotion.

I'm only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it.

I try to begin writing as close to a dreamlike state as I can get.

When I sit down to write, I consider myself an artist.

I pick up my pen. It flows. A building appears. There it is. There is nothing more to say.

When I write, I tend to be quite cut off from the world. At that point of time, I'm not thinking about editors, publishers or readers. I write the story the way it comes to me.

Early on my career, I figured out that I just have to write the book I have to write at that moment. Whatever else is going on in the culture is just not that important. If you could get the culture to write your book, that would be great. But the culture can't write your book.

Writing isn't about the process. It is about creating. The joy comes not from the process but from the creation.

When I lock myself up to write, I cannot allow myself to think about the censor or the reviewer or anyone but my characters and their story!

Fall into your sentences; enjoy writing them. Love the world you are creating.

I like making things. I enjoy putting words and images on a blank space. There should be joy in the writing itself because parts of it are so challenging and lonesome. I take great pleasure in reading, researching, and interviewing. I enjoy forming my sentences and revising them to make them clean.

Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious.

Being a writer is great because you get to come up with stuff.