Literary Insecurity Quotes

I don't know the literary world; I was scared of being confronted with famous names, not knowing what they had written. It was occupied territory I was entering.

Other people just look so comfortable with a book in their hands - I never feel like that.

I'd never done anything useful as far as my writing.

It took me ten minutes to write this very sentence. I'm no writer. This is not my calling.

And as a writer, your self-worth is literally based on the last thing you wrote.

I've always wanted to write, but coming from a small-town background - I was born and brought up in Ludhiana - you think you're not the kind of literary person who will write books that will sell. There was always a kind of defensiveness in me.

For as long as writers have written, they've had second thoughts about their work.

I managed to get my copy of Ulysses through safely this time. I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production.

My hapless peers with their lofty dreams--how I envy and despise them! I'm with the others, the even more hapless, who have no-one but themselves to whom they can tell their dreams and show what would be verses if they wrote them. I'm with those poor slobs who have no books to show, who have no literature beside their own soul, and who are suffocating to death due to the fact that they exist without having taken that mysterious, transcendental exam that makes one eligible to live.

I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.