Patrick White Quotes

I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started.

I wrote my first play when I was eight.

In preschool, I would plan out my show-and-tell every week to be funny and exciting. Then in first grade I wrote a play, and my classmates and I performed it as a puppet show.

I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.

I've always written. At the age of six or seven, I would get sheets of A4 paper and fold them in half, cut the edges to make a little eight-page booklet, break it up into squares and put in little stick men with little speech bubbles, and I'd have a spy story, a space story and a football story.

I began writing in the 4th grade. As a matter of fact, I produced a play for the entire school. It was about Leif Ericson and the discovery of America.

I wrote my first book at eight, all of four pages. At 10, I did a 40-page story. At 12, I wrote two stage plays.

I wrote before I could write. I got my hands on a journal, maybe a hand-me-down; I had three older siblings. My first entries are in the handwriting of the sister closets in age (5 years my senior). She must have gotten tired of my dictations because she gave up and then my blocky scrawl shows up. I wrote plays as a kid mostly.

I love acting, but directing and writing have always been just as important. I started to write so many things when I was even a child. I wrote my first play when I was, like, seven years old. That was me - a writer - for years.

I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since.

I've met writers who wanted to be writers from the age of six, but I certainly had no feelings like that. It was only in the Philippines when I was about 15 that I started reading books by very contemporary writers of the Beatnik generation.

I knew what book we had to write, it was clear in my head; it was journals and poetry. So I passed on their offer. I told my agent this is our vision, and no one's done it this way.

Everyone is not able, or inclined, to write poetry in the narrower sense any more than everyone is qualified to take part in a walking race. But just as all of us can and do walk, so all of us can and do use language poetically.

My first serious attempts at writing were made in 1868, and I took up two very different lines of composition; I wrote some short stories of a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more ambitious character, 'The Lives of the Black Letter Saints.'

I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.

The first story I can remember writing, that I truly set down on paper, was a Christmas story that I wrote when I was ten years old.

I used to joke that if acting didn't work out, poetry was my commonsense fallback.

At the age of 15 months my daughter was diagnosed with very bad asthma, and essentially I put my career on hold for a good eight years.

I wrote the book in my head when I was 6 years old.

By the age of nine, I had a thorough knowledge of contemporary Polish literature as well as of foreign literature in Polish translation, and I began to write poems in honour of a lady of thirty years. Naturally, she knew nothing about them.

I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.

I've been a writer since I was a kid. I've been a writer since I was, you know, dictating stories into a tape deck and trying to get my mom to type them up - when I was really, really little.

When I write a poem, I do not have to worry about using a higher Urdu vocabulary because I know the reader knows Urdu well.

At the age of seventeen, I left school. I went to university, and I wrote my first attempts at poetry in a room in a flat at the edge of the city.

I wrote something when I was 9 that seemed pretty good for a 9 year old; it concerned flowers in our family garden - I was grateful my mother praised it. Of course, I found out later it was pretty silly, but it was the first poem I was proud of.