Paul Muldoon Quotes

I was writing from the age of 10, and I was never really into going to discos and dances and stuff. I never told anyone at school that I did that because I feared it would alienate me even more.

I missed out on my teenage years. I led a sheltered life. I was practicing scales instead of playing football.

The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.

I missed my youth because I was dancing, I didn't do all the crazy stuff. I didn't have boyfriends or anything - the first man I met I married!

I never had any social life, just played the piano and studied, studied, studied.

The only advice I can give to aspiring writers is don't do it unless you're willing to give your whole life to it. Red wine and garlic also helps.

Youth is a period of missed opportunities.

I missed out on everything. Sometimes on the street I see teenagers hanging out and going to the movies, going to concerts, and I get so jealous.

I would advise you to write, my dear friend, because with your active nature, solitude is simply intolerable to you, and after some time your solitude would become perhaps attractive if you were to people it with creatures of your own fancy.

I happen to be pretty productive when I am in jail. When you are in jail, you have to spend more time with yourself.

If you really want to write, then shut yourself in a room, close the door, and WRITE. If you don't want to write, do something else. It's as simple as that.

Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence.

And I remember going to the record studio and there was a park across the street and I'd see all the children playing and I would cry because it would make me sad that I would have to work instead.

Anyone who writes knows that ultimately the majority of your time is spent alone in a room with a piano or a guitar, no matter what the project is.

Once I was condemned to three months' absolute silence. As I could not speak, I wrote a book.

I still have a lot of the stories I wrote in high school. Hand wrote... a number of them are in purple ink, rendering them illegible, a fact we should probably be forever thankful for.

Me in high school, I was kind of a loner. I had a handful of friends. I'd eat my lunch in my car every day in my senior year. I went to ballet. I was a ballerina, so I was very focused on that. You kind of have to be. That was two-thirds of my week, going to ballet class.

I'm quite disappointed that I'll never relive my teenage years.

I didn't really get serious about my own writing until I was convinced it was something that I wanted to do, that I wanted to spend that much time alone.

My dad taught me how to play tennis, and I owe that to him. But the better you get, the higher you climb, and the more lonely you get. I've had to sacrifice a lot of personal relationships, but that's the choice I made.

I have to use all these programs that cut off the internet, force me to be bored, because being bored is an essential part of writing, and the internet has made it very hard to be bored.

When I wrote my novel, 'The Ministry of Special Cases,' I couldn't even brush my teeth. I had to write in isolation from everything else. I thought a play would take away from my fiction, but the more projects I work on, the more time I have.

When you're writing, it's a very solitary job. It's you and your word processor and a cup of tea.

I feel like I wasted my time in my twenties. When you are beginning to realise your potential you wish you'd realized it earlier.

The only thing I regret in life is that I didn't practice basketball more.