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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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!

“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

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

“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

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

“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!

“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

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

“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

“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!

“Each of us, usually by late adolescence, has a mass of knowledge about himself, which—if we took the counsel “Know thyself” seriously—could be examined and considered until the individual’s ideal of the good life would emerge from it plainly. It ought to be part of education to see that each child should understand the necessity of finding this clue to his future, and be shown that it is sometimes thrown into confusion by hero-worship, or by the erroneous notion that what is an item in the success of one must be present in the success of each of us. Still, in spite of confusion, false starts, the taking over of the ambitions of a parent or teacher for ourselves instead of finding our own, most of us do arrive in the early twenties knowing what we are best fitted to do, or could do best if we had the training and opportunity.”
― Dorothea Brande, Wake Up and Live!: A Formula for Success That Really Works!

“Yet death is as much a fact of experience as birth and growth; and if Nature prepares us for each new phase of life by closing off old desires and opening new vistas, it does not seem too difficult to think that we are, always, being slowly, gently reconciled to our eventual relinquishment of all we hold dear as living creatures. And withdrawal from struggle, abandonment of effort, releasing of desire and ambition would be normal movements in an organism which was being gently wooed away from its preoccupation with life.”
― Dorothea Brande, Wake Up and Live!: A Formula for Success That Really Works!

“if the decision goes against you or your suggestion, abandon your own idea and cooperate in the decision whole-heartedly. If you feel that a truly grave mistake is being made, take a few hours to draw up the situation as you see it, show how you think the new decision will alter matters, why you think it is a mistake, or why an alternative plan should be adopted. Try to be as fair about this as you can. Often we think an alternative plan precious because, and only because, it is our own. “Pride of authorship” comes in.”
― Dorothea Brande, Wake Up and Live!

“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!

“Confident, steady, freely-flowing action is what we need. Then safe delight begins. The mind, cleared of its doubts, begins to expand and enjoy its own activity; the rewards of satisfactory action begin to show themselves.”
― Dorothea Brande, Wake Up and Live!: A Formula for Success That Really Works!

“Always your first question to yourself should be, “What would I be doing now if it were really impossible for me to fall at – whatever it is: traveling, modeling, writing, farming?”
― 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!