Clive James Quotes

Somehow writing has always seemed to me to have an element of performance.

When people give you a writing assignment, they're asking what you think. That's the very opposite of being an actor. When you're an actor, no one wants to hear what you think.

I write, but I also act.

I always was a writer, but then I wanted to do stand-up because I thought that was a way that I could perform what I wrote.

Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.

When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If people hear you, it gets in their ears. If you think that way and write at the same time, then poetry gets written. But poetry exists in any case. The question is only: are you going to take part, and if so, how?

Writing reminds you that you're never alone. Writing and reading is to be optimistic.

I love composing and writing music and dancing and performing and conceptualizing creatively for visual mediums. I love to create.

Writing is my form of celebration and prayer.

I like having written better than I like having acted.

Writing is the greatest thing that can happen to a human being. It's the best.

Not all women write the same. But I don't understand why the model is that you're supposed to write like a man, and that means you're a real writer.

The great art of writing is the art of making people real to themselves with words.

I don't really do anything that isn't about writing, and I don't really know who I am if I'm not thinking about writing.

When I'm working, on stage, entertaining people, or watching someone do something amazing, it inspires me to be the best artist that I can be. I enjoy being around art - whether it be a museum, a Broadway show - or even writing a poem. Those are things that make me feel alive and inspire me.

Almost 70 years have gone by, and I've still got that feeling when I write... Writing, for me, is still it. It has always been the basis of everything I do. I'm a writer who performs, not a performer who writes. I love the act of writing. It's still a thrill for me.

The craft of writing is the art of penetrating other minds with the figures that are in your own mind.

I consider writing as a fine art. We kill it by imposing the alphabet on little children and making it the beginning of learning.

But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.

Writing has been my window-flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence-my way of interpreting everything within my grasp.

Writing is like breathing, it's possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.

Everything in my past, in my training, everything that has been most essential in my activity up to now has made me above all a man who writes, and it is too late for that to change.

Writing is one way to achieve enchantment.

I'm a writer. I write not only for a living, I write because I'm a writer.

I do feel like no matter what you're doing, whether it's music or writing a play or a poem or drawing a picture or painting something, that you're speaking to what is it you want to express, what is it you want to see.