Paul Theroux Quotes

It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.

I love writing. I've pursued it with a passion.

Writers were never meant to be professionals. Writing is not a profession, it is an activity, an essentially amateur occupation. It is what you do when you are not living.

Whereas to write, all you need is paper and an idea, so I felt that writing might be my stepping stone.

Writing becomes a really good creative outlet when you're sitting there and feeling creatively frustrated or stilted, but also you then get to write parts for yourself.

Readers would email me and say, 'Please write a novel about so-and-so,' but it has to come from yourself and not so much from your readership.

Being a songwriter does not rely on an audience or other band members or a camera. I can just sit in a room and write songs.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry - writing at writing.

I like to dabble in different things, but music is my first love. It connects to me in a way my side projects don't because it's so personal. I write the words. Music is like my diary. It's my therapy.

I didn't originally intend on writing a book. I started writing during the day to feel like I was accomplishing something creative.

My father, Eric Trethewey, is a poet, so I had one right inside the house. And on long trips, he'd tell me, if I got bored in the car, to write a poem about it. And I did find that poetry was a way for me, I think as it for a lot of people, to articulate those things that seem hardest to say.

I'm pretty grounded on my own passion - writing books, you know, doing programs, speaking around the country. And I love what I do.

Writing is what I do. It's what makes me tick.

When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things.

Of course, I write. I have stories to tell. But I don't want to do superficial stuff any more.

I've always felt an overwhelming need to get out what was inside. The vehicle for me was words on paper - not speech, not art, not dance, not anything else.

I've always wanted to be a writer, and I've kept journals since I was eight years old.

I feel like songwriting, for me, is kind of therapy.

If I'm not writing, I'm not fully living. It has become the essential element that defines who I am.

Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.

Writing is the starting point from which all goodness (and crappiness) flows.

I would feel dead if I didn't have the ability periodically to put my world in order with a poem. I think to be inarticulate is a great suffering, and is especially so to anyone who has a certain knack for poetry.

I did not always know I would be a writer. Until I had a room of my own, I did not write much at all - no more than any other child who read a lot of books. I began to write fiction and poetry when I first had a room that was truly my own with a door that shut and some measure, however fragile, of privacy.

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live.

Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.