Edward Hirsch Quotes

A writer, or any artist, can’t expect to be embraced by the people [but] you just keep doing your work - because you have to, because it’s your calling.

I grew up writing. It was very natural in my household. My father was a poet, and his mother had been a novelist back in Hungary. I don't think I really thought about it being my career until high school, which is still pretty early, but it was a while there of just assuming this was something everyone did all day long.

I knew I wanted to be a writer before I knew that being a writer was possible.

It seems that writing chose me. I feel that because I know history, and I know the history of so many cultures; I have lived a large life.

Writing is a calling, not a choice.

I was writing a lot even as a kid.

I never even considered writing a career option. I just liked the play of words. I was certainly interested in story, but the stories I was telling then were in narrative verse and prose poems, short and succinct, except for one novel-length poem written in narrative couplets.

I've always loved writing.

Since the age of 11, I have loved writing poems and fragments from my life.

Poetry has, in a way, been my bridge to my acting career.

I love the written word so much, I know it's gonna flow naturally.

Not everybody is a great rapper; not everybody lives for the art of lyricism.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

Writing isn't a job so much as a compulsion. I've been writing since I was very young because for some strange reason, I must write, and also because when I write, I feel more alive and closer to the world than when I'm not writing.

I didn't choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side.

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.

There will always be a place for bunnies to talk in rhyme, but that's not what I do.

This is my life - I want to tell stories. There is something huge inside me that pushes me to tell stories, and tell stories for an audience and everybody.

I've known since I was 12 that I wanted to write. My father was a teacher, and there were so many books around, it seemed natural to pick them up.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Writing doesn't leave much time for hobbies, unless you consider that I began writing as a hobby and have made the hobby into a profession.

I have written a lot about the fine arts, but I'd never written about the literary arts, and so on some level Dante really, you know, spoke to me, as new ground but also familiar ground.

I think the novel form chose me. I was a writer before I became a criminal... my first instinct was to write.

I have not the slightest pretension to call my verses poetry; I write now and then for no other purpose than to relieve depression or to improve my English.

But where there is no art show, I would still be painting.