Dorothea Brande > Quotes

“Act as if it were impossible to fail.”
― 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

“All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right-about-face which turns us from failure towards success.”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer

“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, Becoming a Writer

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

“Suppose a man had an appointment a hundred miles north of his home, and that if he kept it he would be sure of having health, much happiness, fair prosperity, for the rest of his life. He has just time enough to get there, just enough gas in his car. He drives out, but decides that it would be more fun to go twenty-five miles south before starting out in earnest. That is nonsense! Yes, isn't it? The gas had nothing to do with it; time had no preference as to how it would be spent; the road ran north as well as south, yet he missed his appointment. Now, if that man told us that, after all, he had quite enjoyed the drive in the wrong direction, that in some ways he found it pleasanter to drive with no objective than to try to keep a date, that he had had a touching glimpse of his old home by driving south, should we praise him for being properly philosophical about having lost his opportunity? No, we should think he had acted like an imbecile. Even if he had missed his appointment by getting into a daydream in which he drove automatically past a road sign or two, we should still not absolve him. Or if he had arrived too late from having lost his way when he might have looked up his route on a good map and failed to do so before starting, we might commiserate with him, but we should indict him for bad judgment. Yet when it comes to going straight to the appointments we make with ourselves and our own fulfillment we all act very much like the hero of this silly fable: we drive the wrong way. We fail where we might have succeeded by spending the same power and time. Failure indicates that energy has been poured into the wrong channel. It takes energy to fail.”
― Dorothea Brande, Wake Up And LIVE!

“Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier.”
― Dorothea Brande

“Every book, every editor, every teacher will tell you that the great key to success in authorship is originality”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer

“There is one sense in which everyone is unique. No one else was born of your parents, at just that time of just that country’s history; no one underwent just your experiences, reached just your conclusions, or faces the world with the exact set of ideas that you must have. If you can come to such friendly terms with yourself that you are able and willing to say precisely what you think of any given situation or character, if you can tell a story as it can appear only to you of all the people on Earth, you will inevitably have a piece of work which is original”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer

“there is just one contribution which every one of us can make: we can give into the common pool of experience some comprehension of the world as it looks to each of us.”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming A Writer

“As for Resistances! They are almost an item of dogma in the current secular religion. Persons who would never dream of going to the time, expense, or trouble of a full analysis will tell you complacently that they have “a resistance” to this or that, and feel that they have done all and more than can be asked of them by admitting their handicap. Remarkable cures of resistances, however, have been observed in those who took solemnly the advice to replace that word with our ancestors’ outmoded synonym for the same thing: “bone-laziness.” It is not quite so much fun, nor so flattering, to be foolishly lazy as it is to be the victim of a technical term, but many are crippled for knowing an impressive word who would have had no such trouble if they had lived in a simpler and less self-indulgent society. Those who are genuinely, deeply, and unhappily in the grip of a neurosis should turn at once to one of the well known therapies. Unless one is willing to do so, it should be made a matter of social disapproval to refer technically to such difficulties.”
― Dorothea Brande, Wake Up and Live!: A Formula for Success That Really Works!

“The first exercise is to spend an hour every day without saying anything except in answer to direct questions.”
― Dorothea Brande, Wake Up and Live!

“My own experience has been that there is no field where one who is in earnest about learning to do good work can make such enormous strides in so short a time.”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer

“Whatever the ostensible purpose may be, it is plain that one motive is at work in all these cases: the intention, often unconscious, to fill life so full of secondary activities or substitute activities that there will be no time in which to perform the best work of which one is capable. The intention, in short, is to fail.”
― Dorothea Brande, Wake Up and Live!: A Formula for Success That Really Works!

“الشيء الوحيد الذي تتفق عليه كل السير الذاتية للكتّاب أن
الكاتب الحقيقي يكون جيداً بمقدار صرامته و حجم مكتبته.”
― 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

“When the Unconscious has us fully at its mercy we talk not as we should voluntarily choose to talk if we could see all the consequences of our speech, but from a need to relieve some half-perceived pressure. So we grumble humorously about our difficulties, and make ourselves self-conscious by doing so. Or we excuse ourselves defiantly. Or we complain of a trifling injustice, and are sometimes startled to see how much more pity we invoke than the occasion warrants. Once we have found a well-spring of pity and indulgence in another, we are seldom mature enough not to take advantage of it, thus reinforcing our infantilism and defeating our growth. One of the worst wiles of the Will to Fail is that it forces its victim to ask for unnecessary advice. Here again, the universal deep motive for asking for advice (unnecessarily, it should be emphasized once more) is that by so doing we can go on feeling protected and cherished even though we are no longer children. But that again means that we are being provided with advance excuses for failure. If we act on the advice of another and are unsuccessful, obviously the failure is not ours but our counsellor’s; isn’t that plain? So we can continue to day-dream of successful action, to believe that if only we had followed our first impulse we could not have failed. Since such motives can be present, it is wise to scrutinize every impulse to ask for advice. If the origin of the desire is above suspicion, then there is only one further question to ask before seeking help with a clear conscience: “If I worked this out for myself, would I consume only my own time?” If the answer to that is “Yes,” then it is generally better to work out the problem independently, unless the amount of time so expended would be grossly disproportionate to the importance of the result. If you are a creative worker, remember that time spent in finding an independent technique is seldom wasted.”
― Dorothea Brande, Wake Up and Live!: A Formula for Success That Really Works!

“Talk for fifteen minutes a day without using I, me, my, mine.”
― Dorothea Brande, Wake Up and Live!

“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.”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer

“The philosophies, the ideas, the dramatic notions of other writers of fiction should not be directly adopted. If you find them congenial, go back to the sources from which those authors originally drew their ideas, if you are able to find them. There study the primary sources and take any items over into your own work only when they have your deep acquiescence— never because the author in whose work you find them is temporarily successful, or because another can use them effectively. They are yours to use only when you have made them your own by full acquaintance and acceptance.”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer

“It is well to understand as early as possible in one’s writing life that there is just one contribution which every one of us can make: we can give into the common pool of experience some comprehension of the world as it looks to each of us”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer

“In my experience, the pupil who sets down the night's dream, or recasts the day before into ideal form, who takes the morning hour to write a complete anecdote or a passage of sharp dialogue, is likely to be the short story writer in embryo. Certain types of character sketching, when it is brief and concerned with rather general (or even obvious) traits, point the same way. A subtler analysis of characters, a consideration of motives, acute self-examination (as distinct from romanticizing one's actions), the contrasting of different characters faced by the same dilemma, most often indicate the novelist. A kind of musing introspection or of speculation only sketched in is found in the essay writer's notebook, although with a grain of drama added, and with the particularizing of an abstract speculation by assigning the various elements of the problem to characters who act out the idea, there is promise of the more meditative type of novelist.”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer

“Think back to some encounter you had today in your office, in a store, with a servant or tradesman in your home. Try to remember just the form your request took. Making all due allowances for courtesy, or for the respectfulness due to superiors and elders, was there not in addition a tentativeness about your request? Didn’t you ask for coöperation in such a way as to leave room for refusal, or grudging action, or for being ignored?”
― Dorothea Brande, Wake Up and Live!: A Formula for Success That Really Works!

“One of the most famous men in America constantly sends himself post-cards, and occasionally notes. He explained the card-sending as being his way of relieving his memory of unnecessary details. In his pocket he carries a few postals addressed to his office. I was with him one threatening day when he looked out the restaurant window, drew a card from his pocket and wrote on it. Then he threw it across the table to me with a grin. It was addressed to himself at his office, and said “Put your raincoat with your hat.” At the office he had other cards addressed to himself at home.”
― Dorothea Brande, Wake Up and Live!

“Try also to be willing to see your work and suggestions acted upon without receiving immediate acknowledgment that the ideas originated with you. This frequently happens in a large organization, and to sulk or stand out for having your rights recognized in every case will only cancel the advance you might have been able to make. If your good idea is one of a series and not a flash in the pan, you can be sure your caliber will eventually make itself felt. If not, the organization is a bad one for you, and you should set about finding a better connection as soon as possible.”
― Dorothea Brande, Wake Up and Live!

“So the working out, however laborious, of an original technique is worth the time expended, the loneliness entailed. With that well in mind, let us consider those times when advice should be taken. You have a genuine problem. The first step, then, should be to write it out, or to formulate it verbally with exactness, so that you can see just what it is that is troubling you. If you simply let the problem wash around in your mind, it will seem greater, and much vaguer, than it will appear on close examination. Then find your expert, whether friend or stranger, but make every effort to find one whose views seem to be congenial to you, since that usually implies similar or congenial mental processes. To do so earlier will mean that you are wasting both your time and his by making him the audience of part of your self-examination. If you are successful in getting an interview, make that as short and concise as possible while still covering all your points. Then follow the advice you are given until you see definite results. If you are tempted to say “Oh, that won’t work for me,” then you should suspect your own motives. Such a rejection implies that you already had a course of action in mind, and were more than half-hoping that you would be advised to follow it. Watching an example of the wrong attitude towards advice and instruction here may be more illuminating than any positive example.”
― Dorothea Brande, Wake Up and Live!: A Formula for Success That Really Works!

“First of all, we can use imagination to see ourselves and our work in some perspective. Everyone knows how a child identifies himself utterly with all he owns and does, with all those who care for him. He is outraged if asked to share his possessions, the breaking of a beloved toy is a tragedy, if it rains on the day when a picnic was planned one would think the sun could never shine for him again. If a mother or nurse leaves him while he is awake, he has been most treacherously betrayed. In fact, much early education has as its one goal the teaching of the little egotist to see himself in somewhat truer relation to his world. More or less successfully, each of us has had to learn this lesson; but it is almost never fully understood. To our last days there is still a trace of that childish egotism in us—sometimes so very much more than a trace that an adult suffers, resents, sulks, and complains in a way only too reminiscent of the nursery.”
― Dorothea Brande, Wake Up and Live!: A Formula for Success That Really Works!

“many are crippled for knowing an impressive word who would have had no such trouble if they had lived in a simpler and less self-indulgent society.”
― Dorothea Brande, Wake Up and Live!: A Formula for Success That Really Works!