Joseph Joubert Quotes

Young writers should read books past bedtime and write things down in notebooks when they are supposed to be doing something else.

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.

It was like being given a maths problem when your brain's exhausted, and you know there's some far-off solution, but you can't work up the energy even to give it a go. Something in me just gave up.

Reading is a heady thing. You can be into the action of someone's thoughts and take a whole trip down someone's ruminations while seconds tick by in the world that they're in, but you can't really do that in film.

From reading too much, and sleeping too little, his brain dried up on him and he lost his judgment.

From time to time, I need a rest from the exercitation of my intellect.

I wasn't even sure I'd be able to walk. I couldn't even go outside. Maybe I was just burnt crisp from the gruelling schedule I had been keeping for years.

Sadly, I haven't had a brain cell since I had children.

Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.

An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play.

From morning when I wake up until I go to sleep, I am working. I go to bed and I want to switch off, but the brain doesn't switch off.

When you are in a room and your job is to write jokes 10 hours a day, your mind starts going to strange places.

I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.

And about in the late '80s, I got kind of burned out a little bit.

I love poetry. If my mind gets a bit tight or bound up with information or depressed with bad news, I find a good book of poetry is like going to the gym for an hour. My mind just expands.

My nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I am absolutely bored and listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me.

I'm quite well-rehearsed in having mental days; being awake at the crack of dawn and still having to be awake late at night.

Oh, he's magic. Faulkner has opened passages in my brain. You do things you'd never expect.

You know those hard days you go home where you've been worked to the bone and you just want to do nothing? In fight prep, every day is that day.

The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.

My pen and paper causes a chain reaction, to get your brain relaxing.

I took my brains out and stretched them on the rack, now I'm not too sure I'm gonna get them back.

I could not live by literature if only to begin with, because of the slow maturing of my work and its special character.

You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.

I always think about myself as a writer; that comes out of being a reader first, and I don't think I kind of got to really playing with language in any formal way probably until I was in my mid-twenties.