Alice Oswald Quotes

Poetry was the first step, and from the age of 18, there was nothing else I wanted to do.

No one looks at a baby and says, 'You are going to be a great novelist, and you really need to start writing now.' Something in us says: 'This is what I must do.'

English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.

My first book was the book that changed my life.

At the age of 15, a teacher had asked me what I wanted to do for a career, and without knowing why or even how I replied that I wanted to be a poet.

I didn't dream about being a director. I didn't know I wanted to do something with film until the summer between my sophomore and junior years at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.

Some people say, 'Write what you know.' My thing is, 'Write what scares you.'

Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15.

Sometimes I wonder why I'm a novelist right now. There is no definite career reason why I became a writer. Something happened, and I became a writer. And now I'm a successful writer.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn't think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry.

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.

There were always moments where I'd say, 'What else can I do with my life?' But when I was 30 years old and discovered I could write - I wrote 'Black Cloud' in six weeks - it opened up a whole new world for me.

If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet... Sometimes you can go looking for illumination.

I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.

My dedication to trying to be a poet started very, very young, and I was very well encouraged by good teachers and by older friends and so on, so I think it is a benediction, and I also think it is a calling, a duty.

Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it, putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before.

I still believe many poets begin in fear and hope: fear that the poetic past will turn out to be a monologue rather than a conversation. And hope that their voice can be heard as that past turns into a future.

It was at that age that poetry came in search of me.

I always wanted to write poetry, even when I was very young.

I started to write a series of fantasy novels when I was eleven. I have never taken anything artistic as seriously; since then, writing has felt like an attempt to get back there, to my bedroom, my maps, those races and languages and runes.

Literature has guided me through my whole life.

I remember reading Dr. Seuss books, and he's rhyming so many words together and I just loved the way it sounded. It became a challenge for me, to put words together that nobody would ever think about putting together.

When I was 9, I saw 'Star Wars,' and it set me on a path to where I am today.

Lyricism was placed into my head in Ireland.