Dorothea Brande Quotes & Sayings

Hitch your unconscious mind to your writing arm. — Dorothea Brande

The genius keeps all his days the vividness and intensity of interest that a sensitive child feels in his expanding world. — Dorothea Brande

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

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 the other ... — Dorothea Brande

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

Writing calls on unused muscles and involves solitude and immobility. — Dorothea Brande

Criticism and rejection are not personal insults, but your artistic component will not know that. It will quiver and wince and run to cover, and you will have trouble in luring it out again to observe and weave tales and find words for all the thousand shades of feeling that go to make up a story. — Dorothea Brande

It is the sum of small things successfully done that lifts a life out of bondage to the humdrum. — Dorothea Brande

If you can discover what you like, if you can discover what you truly believe about most of the major matters of life, you will be able to write a story which is honest and original and unique. — Dorothea Brande

Old habits are strong and jealous. — Dorothea Brande

The games of the ancient Greeks were, in their original institutions, religious solemnities. — Dorothea Brande

In the long run it makes little difference how cleverly others are deceived; if we are not doing what we are best equipped to do, or doing well what we have undertaken as our personal contribution to the world's work, at least by way of an earnestly followed avocation, there will be a core of unhappiness in our lives which will be more and more difficult to ignore as the years pass. — Dorothea Brande

In matching your wits against yourself you take on the shrewdest and wiliest antagonist you can have, and consequently a victorious outcome in this duel of wits brings a great feeling of triumph. — Dorothea Brande

Most of the methods of training the conscious side of the writer-the craftsman and the critic in him- are actually hostile to the good of the artist's side; and the converse of this proposition is likewise true. But it is possible to train both sides of the character to work in harmony, and the first step in that education is to consider that you must teach yourself not as though you were one person, but two. — Dorothea Brande

Old habits are strong and jealous. They will not be displaced easily if they get any warning that such plans are afoot; they will fight for their existence with subtlety and persuasiveness. — Dorothea Brande

The worst effect of party is its tendency to generate narrow, false, and illiberal prejudices, by teaching the adherents of one party to regard those that belong to an opposing party as unworthy of confidence. — Dorothea Brande

A problem clearly stated is a problem half solved. — Dorothea Brande

Act as though it is impossible to fail. — Dorothea Brande

Most writers flourish greatly on a simple, healthy routine with occasional time off for gaiety. — Dorothea Brande

Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier. — Dorothea Brande

All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. — Dorothea Brande

Act boldly and unseen forces will come to your aid. — Dorothea Brande

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

Act boldly and unforeseen forces will come to your aid. — Dorothea Brande

I suspect that every teacher hears the same complaints, but that, being seldom a practicing author, he tends to dismiss them as out of his field, or to see in them evidence that the troubled student has not the true vocation. Yet it is these very pupils who are most obviously gifted who suffer from these disabilities, and the more sensitively organized they are the higher the hazard seems to them. Your embryo journalist or hack writer seldom asks for help of any sort; he is off after agents and editors while his more serious brother-in-arms is suffering the torments of the damned because of his insufficiencies. Yet instruction in writing is oftenest aimed at the oblivious tradesman of fiction, and the troubles of the artist are dismissed or overlooked. — Dorothea Brande

There are seeds of self-destruction in all of us that will bear only unhappiness if allowed to grow. — Dorothea Brande

A problem is often half-solved when it is clearly stated. — Dorothea Brande

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. — Dorothea Brande