A Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

W. Somerset Maugham

Quote Topics

Sixties Trouble Writers Young Young Writers

Quote Author

W. Somerset Maugham
British - Novelist
January 25, 1874 - December 16, 1965

Living in a cultural milieu where the foreign writers most widely available and admired were Russian, I came very late to postwar American writers, and I had great trouble with the canonically exalted white male writers I tried first.

Pankaj Mishra

I think the Sixties in some ways is a barrier to young people today. They think of it, you know, what we're doing is not that. But it's partly the myth of the Sixties. It always felt embattled and small. It always, almost always, was a small group of people relative to the opposition around.

Bernadine Dohrn

As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.

Stephen King

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

David Foster Wallace

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Lillian Hellman

There's not that many people from the sixties who have progressed as writers and are continuing on. They're out there. But I'm one of them who's just continued on, following his own little inner madness.

Creed Bratton

Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.

Wallace Stegner

There is a lot of sixties-bashing going on these days that I don't agree with at all. I feel that extremely important ideals were brought to the forefront of the collective consciousness at that time. Granted, drug use was so pervasive that our generation did not as a group have the capacity to manifest our ideals to any great extent. But many of the people who were young in the sixties and who were most touched by that collective ethos are still touched.

Marianne Williamson

I think sometimes writers can get themselves into trouble trying to exert a totally controlled and super-knowing tone. This kind of knowingness is not the most promising tone to be sustained throughout a novel, to have a young woman who understands everybody and is always reading a room perfectly.

Rachel Kushner

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Lillian Hellman

I've grown up on a diet of metaphors. If young writers would find those writers who can give them metaphors by the bushel and the peck, then they'll become better writers - to learn how to capsualize things and present them in metaphorical form.

Ray Bradbury

Better never trouble trouble until trouble troubles you; for you only make your trouble double trouble when you do.

Robert D Keppel

But the whole point of the Sixties was that you had to take people as they were. If you came in with us you left your class, and colour, and religion behind, that was what the Sixties was all about.

Michael Caine

That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.

Renata Adler

When you're a young actor, there's this pressure to rush. But I hope to be doing this into my sixties and seventies, so I'd prefer to take my time.

Felicity Jones

I guess when I was younger, I'd have assumed that in 2008 music would be full of great writers following in the tradition of the young great writers of the '60s and '70s, but it hasn't turned out that way, or at least there are no other writers around that I look at and think: 'Wow, I'm outclassed, I need to get out of this business.'

David Berman

A Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors