A Quote by Patrick Kavanagh

Young writers should keep out of pubs and remember that the cliche way of the artistic life is a lie. — © Patrick Kavanagh
Young writers should keep out of pubs and remember that the cliche way of the artistic life is a lie.
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.'
I have a work-out regime; I am not a maniac. It sounds cliche, but stand-up comedy, doing a one-man show, helps keep me young, and yes, it is exhausting, but I don't collapse.
I've already spent a lot of my life doing what makes me go. There's a life out there while I'm still young, able to move, able to just sit at peace in the water - I should be spending much more time doing that, rather than continuing to go through this artistic struggle.
But it's clear to me that us slow-poke writers are a dying breed. It's amazing how thoroughly my young writing students have internalized the new machine rhythm, the rush many of my young writers are in to publish. The majority don't want to sit on a book for four, five years. The majority don't want to listen to the silence inside and outside for their artistic imprimatur. The majority want to publish fast, publish now.
I really don't want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto.
Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.
The cliché of that sort of wasted, renegade, drugged-out musician of the '70s is kind of dead and gone now. And I suppose that a lot of people still keep relying on that, or some kind of image to perpetuate something that they think they're supposed to sound like. But that kind of takes you away from real inspiration and, you know, real artistic discovery of the individual.
The essential in artistic creativity is victory over the burden of necessity. In art, man lives outside himself, outside his burdens, the burdens of life. Every creative artistic act is a partial transfiguration of life. In the artistic concept man breaks out through the heaviness of the world. In the creative-artistic attitude towards this world we catch a glimpse of another world.
We should get young people to be more concerned about our debt and point out to them that promising them more all the time is a completely unsustainable way of being and that it's a lie to say that the top one percent are going to pay for it.
Dying young is the easy way out. It's much harder to keep your edge and keep it going.
Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship.
When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.
There's a Harvard Business School thing that says, 'Every 10 years you should replant yourself,' and the only way to keep young is to learn new things and keep curious.
This is for writers yet to be published who think the uphill climb will never end. Keep believing. This is also for published writers grown jaded by the process. Remember how lucky you are.
There are certain books that should be taken away from young writers; that should be prised out of their clutching fingers and locked away until they are all grown up and ready to read them without being smitten.
Producers are men who will keep their heads in the noisy presence of writers and directors and not be carried away by art in any of its subversive guises. Their task is to guard against the unusual. They are the trusted loyalists of cliche.
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