Matt de la Pena Quotes

I was completely devoted to reading and books from the age of seven. It took until I was 18 to have the confidence to write poetry.

I want to branch out. I want to write. I write poetry. I want to see my children grow up well.

I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.

I read less of everything now. With only fond memories of others' work, it will be interesting to give my own journal writing a try now.

Read something of interest every day - something of interest to you, not to your teacher or your best friend or your minister/rabbi/priest. Comics count. So does poetry. So do editorials in your school newspaper. Or a biography of a rock star. Or an instructional manual. Or the Bible.

I always wrote. I wrote from when I was 12. That was therapeutic for me in those days. I wrote things to get them out of feeling them, and onto paper. So writing in a way saved me, kept me company. I did the traditional thing with falling in love with words, reading books and underlining lines I liked and words I didn't know.

I actually never liked writing on my own or in school until I'd had my blog for a while and realized I'd been writing every day for years.

I keep a notebook on my bedside table and write poetry every night before I go to sleep. It's been something I've been doing since I was in the second grade, when I was encouraged by my teacher.

I used to write poems more when I was younger, but I haven't in a long time. I just write ideas and paragraphs and go from there.

I'm an actress, primarily. I love to write poetry. I've been writing poetry since I was 12 years old.

I enjoy so many different art forms; I don't just want to focus on acting. I love music. I love writing stories. And you need solitude to figure out your next step.

I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me.

You are going to have to give and give and give, or there's no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.

one learns best, and writes best, in a state of defiance.

I'm going to continue writing. I'll always be a storyteller. But I'm also taking time to enjoy my life.

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

I was a very violent kid. I think movies and writing and art have been a way of channeling this. But I have will to defend people - it can be all sorts of people.

My mother married again after my father's death - another Royal Air Force officer, and a very different kind of man. We went to Australia when I was eight or nine. We lived there for a couple of years, and then came back and lived in North Wales for the whole of my teenage years... I learned how to write poems quite a lot. I just had a good time reading and reading and reading. So that's where I did most of my growing up.

There's more substance in my prose and my poetry than in all my films together. Writing is a more direct way of expressing yourself because, in cinema, you always have finances, organization, actors, technical apparatus and all that stuff coming in between.

I want to make a poem of my life.

I always was interested in prose. As a teenager, I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and I find this more difficult in poetry.

And now my old dog is dead, and another I had after him, and my parents are dead, and that first world, that old house, is sold and lost, and the books I gathered there lost, or sold- but more books bought, and in another place, board by board and stone by stone, like a house, a true life built, and all because I was steadfast about one or two things: loving foxes, and poems, the blank piece of paper, and my own energy- and mostly the shimmering shoulders of the world that shrug carelessly over the fate of any individual that they may, the better, keep the Niles and Amazons flowing.

Writing is a subtle art that is reached mostly by self-discovery and experimentation.

At this point in my life, I'm probably not gonna be able to stop writing because it's gonna help me be able to do what I need to do.