Karl Kraus Quotes

I have always thought of myself as a writer, only because I need things to direct, and I can't not write the things that I direct.

I'm a writer, and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself.

I started out life as a writer, and writers write in part because they don't want to talk.

Writing is an extreme privilege but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself and it's a gift of giving a story to someone.

As a writer, I wouldn't know how to not take things out of my life.

The best part of our lives is just every day when we are writing.

Anyone who has problems, or worries, anyone who laughs and cries, anyone who feels can write. It's only talking on paper... talking about the things that matter to us.

A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you're in his life, he uses yours, too.

I started writing because I found I could spend more time in my own imagination by doing that than I could by reading.

For me, writing isn't a way of being public or private; it's just a way of being. The process is always full of pain, but I like that. It's a reality, and I just accept it as something not to be avoided.

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

If you're writing, you're starting in private. It can really be this amazing, private, freeing experience. Forget that it's for other people - that comes in later.

Never regret what you don't write.

I do write by hand. I just think - I don't know, it's a physical thing for me. It's a bodily thing. It literally has to earn its way through my hand.

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

I always talk to my students about the need to write for the joy of writing. I try to sort of disaggregate the acclaim from the act of writing.

The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication.

Sometimes when I find myself very irritated about a topic, I know it's my next book.

I just sort of write the book I feel like writing given the emotional place I am in my life at the time.

I'm not a writer because I want to make money. I'm a writer because I'm a very slow thinker, but I do care about thinking, and the only way I know how to think with any kind of finesse is by telling stories.

I had never really thought of myself as a writer; any writing I had done was just to give myself something to draw.

As a writer, I have learned that each time I pick up my pencil I betray someone.

Writing gave me a life.

That's the advantage of being a writer: No matter what happens, as long as you survive it, it goes into the work.

I love the physical act of writing as well as how I grow which each situation I put on the page.