Joseph Brodsky Quotes

One of the things you get to do as a writer is that you get to learn new stuff all the time, and I hope that I'm a better writer when I'm 70 than I was when I was 30. That's one of the great things about a literary career.

I got into writing in college... well, in elementary school. But in college, I started writing seriously and had a professor who read my writing and gave me permission to pursue that as a real effort and time-consuming effort.

I started writing seriously about 1960, at the fairly advanced age of 30.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

You don't make a decision about being a writer. There was a point, aged 21, when it became clear that this is who I am. The choice is how good you are going to be at it and how hard you are going to work.

I have written my whole life. I remember writing as a small child.

I began writing seriously in my mid-20s and didn't publish my first book until I was 41.

The only thing that remained consistent over the years was my ability and enthusiasm to tell the story.

I'm not embarrassed about the novels I wrote when I was younger, but I couldn't write them today because of my religion.

I've been writing since I was really young, so I considered myself a writer for a really long time.

I don't write as much erotic romance as I used to, but I think that's just because my writing style has changed.

I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.

I've figured out in the course of my life that the one thing I'm good at doing is writing books, and it would be crazy to trade that in for something else.

I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.

I started writing seriously when I was a teenager, around 14 years old.

My theory is that I decided to be a writer when I was about seven, but of course it is not as simple as that. Like most writers, I had to work at other things to earn a living and wrote mainly in the evenings, often very late at night, for many years.

The desire to write grows with writing.

The first time I can remember thinking that I would like to be a writer came in sixth grade, when our teacher Mrs. Crandall gave us an extended period of time to write a long story. I loved doing it. I started working seriously at becoming a writer when I was seventeen.

I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.

By the time I was 23 or 24 and had written the first manuscript of 'The Final Winter', I knew I wanted to make it a career but didn't know how. It took me a long time to grow into myself, but when my love of writing returned, it did so with an enormous amount of venom. It is now a mainstay in my life.

I've been writing since I'm five years old. I've been writing books since high school - junior high, high school. I write every single day. I never thought I'd be published.

I personally feel I still have so much to learn as a writer; each novel is better than the one before, just because I'm getting better at it.

I really only have been seriously writing, finishing things and publishing things since January '91.

For years, I never really pondered how I came to be a writer from where I came from.

Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.