Alain de Botton Quotes

The idea of being a novelist is really romantic, but it's kind of the same as being president of the United States - it's not gonna happen.

I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn't write again until I was a senior in college.

I think everyone's intentions are to become a performer at first. But by the time I was in high school and college, I discovered that I liked writing and that I was probably a little better at it.

Sure, best seller. I'd love to knock Stephen King off the top of the list. I know I won't, but, after all, I spend my life inventing a different reality.

I have earned wages as a waitress, a nanny, a librarian, a personnel officer, an agricultural laborer, an advertising secretary, a typesetter, a proofreader, a mental-health-care provider, a substitute teacher, and a book reviewer. In and around the edges of all those jobs I have written poems, stories, and books, books, books.

I was a writer. I just wasn't a very good one. I was lucky enough to have a playwriting teacher who told me that I'd be a better actor than I would a playwright.

I never considered myself a writer. I'm a teacher. In a way, I feel kind of... kind of guilty for all the people who are writers who hope to be on the best-seller list someday, who live for that and don't get it, and it came to me as a kind of free gift, like God coming to Abraham and announcing, 'I've chosen you!'

I was a schoolteacher; I taught seventh and eighth grade, and I tried to write fiction on the side.

I'm not a writer who teaches. I'm a teacher who writes.

In any profession, whether it's teachers or doctors or lawyers, the more we say we're not going to evaluate those people on the merits, I think that's when the profession goes into decline.

I started writing stories when I was six years old. I was a very shy kid, extremely shy, and I had a fabulous first-grade teacher who told me to write.

I do not say that all men are equal in their ability, character and motivation. I do say that every American should be given a fair chance to develop all the talents they may have.

I never even considered writing a career option. I just liked the play of words. I was certainly interested in story, but the stories I was telling then were in narrative verse and prose poems, short and succinct, except for one novel-length poem written in narrative couplets.

A lot of people can figure out the social media aspect of it, or the merchandising aspect, or whatever and get enough momentum to start a career. To sustain it, you have to keep writing and you have to keep creating.

I was 12 or 13 years old. So I started to write poetry and fiction, even though I was really into biology because my dad was a science teacher. I kept writing all those years.

I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.

A major writer combines these three - storyteller, teacher, enchanter - but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.

Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words 'Write what you know' is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don't. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?

Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.

I wrote poetry from the time I could write. That was the only way I could begin to express who I was but the poems didn't make sense to my teachers. They didn't rhyme. They were about the wind sounds, the planets' motions, never about who I was or how I felt. I didn't think I felt anything. I was this mind more than a body or a heart. My mind photographing the stars, hearing the wind.

Writing talent is similar to the art of chatting up a girl. You can improve to a certain degree through practice, but basically you are either born with it or you aren't.

She’d majored in English, hoping that meant she could spend the next four years reading and writing. And maybe the next four years after that.

The definition of a writing career, is write a book, write another book, write another book

In the United States, if you ask teachers, "Are there children whom we should call 'gifted?'", many if not most will say 'No.' That's the politically correct answer. But if you then ask the teacher to rank order students in terms of how well they paint or write or dance, they'll have little difficulty in doing so.

I never thought I'd be a person who would want to write books...I promise you not a single English teacher I've ever had would have thought that this would be going on right now.