Bel Kaufman Quotes

I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

I'll probably be writing as long as I'm breathing.

I never feel so alive as when I'm writing and the work is going well.

One of the wonderful things about being a writer is that you're constantly dredging up some arcane knowledge or long-forgotten experience, rediscovering old passions and interests.

I drew pictures rapidly and with few lines, because I had to write most of the pieces, too, and couldn't monkey long with the drawings. The divine urge was no higher than that.

No one can learn to love by following a manual, and no one can learn to write by following a course. I'm not telling you to seek out other writers but to find people with different skills from yourself, because writing is no different from any other activity done with joy and enthusiasm.

When a person applies enthusiasm to his job, the job will itself become alive with exciting new possibilities.

What is required is sight and insight- then you might add one more: excite.

Teaching well draws from the same well that writing draws from: the reserves of compassion and ability to listen and concentrate on another. So I have to have fine line between teaching and writing. I try not to ever think of career. I just try to go to the dream world every day.

Time, which is your enemy in almost everything in this life, is your friend in writing.

I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started writing every day. I never stopped.

I enjoy being a student and learning. I don't think you should ever stop being a student. That's where the most creative ideas come from. Teaching is a blessing as well because I get to share what I've learned and my passion for creative movement with people.

To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.

I have long since decided if you wait for the perfect time to write, you'll never write. There is no time that isn't flawed somehow.

Life is short. I'm here to make music, I'm not here to sit on a beach. That sounds really boring to me.

I like when people are very passionate about what they want to write about. Even if it's silly, you can be very passionate about it.

When I am angry I can write, pray, and preach well, for then my whole temperament is quickened, my understanding sharpened, and all mundane vexations and temptations depart.

I'm very driven by writing.

What I still ask for daily-for life as long as I have work to do, and work as long as I have life.

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and destroys your reserves.

I used to worry I was entirely uninteresting, but the truth is I think if my life was more exciting I'd never have any time to write.

The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.

I've always looked at people like Carine Roitfeld, Donatella Versace, DVF...people who when you walk on a set you feel like they still have so much excitement for what they're doing every day and they just have so much youth even though they've been doing it for so long. Every day just working to keep a young spirit - because even when you're young that's hard to do, because you get so caught up in things. I just think it's so important to make an effort every day to have a young spirit. Then when you get older, you always kind of keep that.