A Quote by Madison Smartt Bell

Imaginative writing has always been a solitary and indeed a somewhat antisocial activity. Apprenticeship existed, no doubt, but it was an apprenticeship to books and not to living masters of the craft.

Madison Smartt Bell

Quote Topics

Activity Always Antisocial Apprenticeship Been Books Craft Doubt Existed Imaginative Indeed Living Masters No Doubt Solitary Somewhat Writing

Quote Author

Madison Smartt Bell
American - Novelist
Born: August 1, 1957

One of the things I learnt over the years is that there is a craft to writing, like there is a craft to acting. I hadn't done my apprenticeship as a writer. I did try to be a writer for hire but I'm not any good at it.

Lennie James

Most people won't realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.

Katherine Anne Porter

Most people won't realise that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.

Katherine Anne Porter

I grew up around poets and novelists and my dad wrote poems about everything - from a cat sleeping in a window to a car wreck he passed on the highway. I learned not to censor myself: that was one of things I learned in my apprenticeship, my creative-writing apprenticeship with my dad.

Lucinda Williams

I got into hairdressing and moved from Dorset to London, where I got an apprenticeship at Vidal Sassoon. This was around '83 or '84. I was working on South Molton Street, which was then the epicenter of all the shops. It was like a catwalk. So I did my apprenticeship there, but I wasn't successful.

Guido Palau

Writing about Africa by Africans has been part of my literary apprenticeship, standing alongside works by authors such as Joseph Conrad, Joyce Cary and Graham Greene as influences.

Giles Foden

Philip Pullman and Jacqueline Wilson have both been writing for a long time. In 30 years, will writers of that quality have been able to serve the same sort of apprenticeship? Not unless they can make enough money now to live on.

Tony Bradman

The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.

Russell Banks

I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Knowledge-based apprenticeships kickstart careers. Just look at British fashion designer Karen Millen, for example, who learned her craft through an apprenticeship scheme.

Peter Jones

If you're young enough, any kind of writing you do for a short period of time is a marvelous apprenticeship.

Irwin Shaw

Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.

Cynthia Ozick

I've been working for many years and I think I've managed to work with some of the best people in the business, which has been rewarding and an apprenticeship.

Aaron Eckhart

For correct writing, the cultivation of patience and mental accuracy is essential. Throughout the young author's period of apprenticeship, he must keep reliable dictionaries and textbooks at his elbow; eschewing as far as possible that hasty extemporaneous manner of writing which is the privilege of more advanced students.

H. P. Lovecraft

Start early and work hard. A writer's apprenticeship usually involves writing a million words (which are then discarded) before he's almost ready to begin. That takes a while.