Knut Hamsun Quotes

If you want to be a serious writer, then you have to write what there is to write about. If you're going to pull your punches and second-guess yourself and not do things because you're worried, then don't write. Stay home and do something else.

The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend on it for their daily bread and the highest form of literature, Poetry, brings no wealth to the singer.

In a poem, the words happen; they just come. I let them. Otherwise, I wouldn't write. To interfere with what is happening is to distort the poem. Just a very small degree of intelligence and supervision is necessary. Very tactful. Any revision later that violates the text as it came, that begins rewriting the words, is fake.

To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration

He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem.

For a poet, making poems is a way of viewing the world, being in the world, breathing.

I never retouch a sketch: I take a canvas the same size, as I may change the composition somewhat. But I always strive to give the same feeling, while carrying it on further.

On one plane, the very great writers and the popular romancers of the lower order always meet. They use all of themselves, helplessly, unselectively. They are above the primness and good taste of declining to give themselves away.

I grew up around poets and novelists and my dad wrote poems about everything - from a cat sleeping in a window to a car wreck he passed on the highway. I learned not to censor myself: that was one of things I learned in my apprenticeship, my creative-writing apprenticeship with my dad.

The best of our fiction is by novelists who allow that it is as good as they can give, and the worst by novelists who maintain that they could do much better if only the public would let them.

Good or bad, the one thing I can say about my art is, if I can quote Sinatra, I did it my way.

I was trying to find my way into the music business still, but I didn't want to portray something that I wasn't. I really wanted to be just me.

All I want to do is give the world my heart... Record label tryina make me compromise my art.

The poet's first rule must be never to bore his readers; and his best way of keeping this rule is never to bore himself-which, of course, means to write only when he has something urgent to say.

The desire to be liked is acceptable in real life but very problematic in fiction. Pleasantness is the enemy of good fiction. I try to write on the premise that no one is going to read my work. Because there's this terrible impulse to grovel before the reader, to make them like you, to write with the reader in mind in that way. It prevents you doing work that is ugly or upsetting or difficult. The temptation is to not be true to what you want to write and to be considerate or amusing instead. I'm always trying to fight against the impulse to make my readers like me.

It's always disappointing when people decide for one reason or another that they don't like your work anymore, but you can't try to please people, because then you're just going to be doing - you'll never live it down, y'know it'll always be dogging you around - you might be being a fake about the whole thing.

My musical ambitions are not that great. I make music I like, and thankfully - for my ability to make an (fairly...) honest living - at least some others like the music too.

If I don't have to think about the commercial aspect of it, then I feel like I'm going to make better films.

I don't think it matters what the frequency is of me writing or directing a movie. It doesn't really matter to anybody else. I'm just trying to put good things out there.

I think being an activist and an artist is an interesting contradiction, because so often they are at odds with one another. When you write as an artist you have to clean the palate of your own politics in creating characters and activism is kind of the exact opposite.

I don't impose political responsibilities on my fiction. The last thing I would ever want to do, for example, is write a novel that would appear to want to tell people what to think about the immigration debate, and I would never write a novel whose sole ambition was to give a "positive" view of immigrants. I'm for open borders, by the way - down with the nation state!

The ideal life is you don't sell a single magazine, nobody's interested, but they want to come see your movie. Because that gives you true freedom.

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.

When you're making a movie, you can't think anybody will ever see it. You've just got to make a movie for the values it has. The greatest films were made because someone really wanted to make them. And, hopefully, the audience will show up, too.

Authors have to write for their characters, for who they are, that's the strength of books. Don't worry about censors. Just write the story you need to tell and the rewards will come.