Clive Sinclair Quotes

The impulse to write comes, I think, from a desire - perhaps a need - to give imaginative life to experience, to share it with the reader, not to cover up the truth but to deliver it obliquely.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.

Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.

It seemed uncanny that words, spread across a page just so, had the power to transport me to another time or place. But they could.

The greatest compliment that anyone can pay me is that after I say something, they remember it. I'll go over a piece of copy until I've gotten the essence of what the writer had in mind - every nuance.

People in this world of superficial communication find themselves isolated and lonely and have difficult in talking about personal things that really matter to them.

It was the part of Gambian culture where they give each other advice a lot, how they're always comparing things in order to get a message across... that really influenced the way I write.

We all struggle with our failure to communicate and our failure to reach beyond fear to love people.

People love stories. They need stories.

It's weird to try to write lyrics for somebody else. They can't really get behind what you're saying or what you want them to say because they didn't experience it.

People need stories; they want stories. They always will.

Personal narrative is one of the few things where people don't get caught up in fighting over esoteric rhetoric.

I love telling people's stories.

When I write promotionally, I guess I give away the ones I'm less connected to.

Storytelling is my true passion.

I really love storytelling.

I like the idea that songs can communicate in a way no other media can. That's why I write them.

I do love storytelling.

What I would love is for people to see some of the stories I want to tell.

Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.

Speaking of love, one problem that recurs more and more frequently these days, in books and plays and movies, Is the inability of people to communicate with the people they love: husbands and wives who can't communicate, Children who can't communicate with their parents, and so on. And the characters in these books and plays and so on, And in real life, I might add, spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can't communicate. I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up!

Explaining is a difficult art. You can explain something so that your reader understands the words; and you can explain something so that the reader feels it in the marrow of his bones. To do the latter, it sometimes isn't enough to lay the evidence before the reader in a dispassionate way. You have to become an advocate and use the tricks of the advocate's trade.

Good writers are in the business of leaving signposts saying, Tour my world, see and feel it through my eyes; I am your guide.

If you're my friend I should be able to talk to you but I can't, and if I can't talk to you, well, what is the point of you? Of us?

Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head.