Youthful Writing Quotes

The comic novels I did when I was in my 20s had a harder edge - less sympathy for people. Or a sympathy that was harder to detect: Characters' foibles and obsessive bents were unrelenting, like caricatures.

The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.

I wrote a lot when I was younger, though never anything like plays or scripts.

Anything I wrote before the age of 17 is probably worth putting a pin in and moving on.

I was eighteen when I wrote my first book, and I can't remember what it was called. I have no idea where the manuscript is - I lost it when I was twenty-one.

Writing for adults and writing for young people is really not that different. As a reporter, I have always tried to write as clearly and simply as possible. I like clean, unadorned writing. So writing for a younger audience was largely an exercise in making my prose even more clear and direct, and in avoiding complicated digressions.

You litter poems with too much learning when you're younger.

At the beginning, I experienced writing as a sort of constraint. Starting so young as a writer is pitiable: it's beyond your powers; you have to lay bare things that are very heavy, and you don't have the means for that.

When I was young and I look at the things that I wrote - I don't think that was the word they used back then, but they had a hipster sensibility. They were a little irreverent.

I can't seem to write young enough anymore.