Political Writing Quotes

I've always loved reading manifestos. Collectively, they represent a triumph of style.

I don't write political stuff. I'm sure I've made attempts, but I don't tend to write very topical things, either. I admire those people who do because it's a talent I don't have.

I generalized rashly: That is what kills political writing, this absurd pretence that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man making notes about what you think. You are not building the Pantheon, then why act like a graven image? You are drawing sketches in the sand which the sea will wash away.

Consider the Essay as a political pamphlet on the Revolution side, and the fact that it was the Whig gospel for a century, and you will see its working merit.

It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you'll be labeled a political writer.

When people used to call me a political writer, it was kind of confusing because I was always much more interested in the social end of things which hinges on the political, but it isn't really part of it.

I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that doesn't have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular, although many men are born upright.

As I got into my teens, I started reading better books, beginning with the Beats and then the hippie writers, people like Wallace Stegner up in Northern California, and all the political New Journalism stuff, the Boys on the Bus dudes and Ken Kesey.

I do write, but for now I am keeping it all in the desk drawer. I have always written. The only book that I have published was "Revolution," during the election campaign, a book that contains both personal and political chapters. I have never been happy with what I have written, including three novels that, from my point of view, are incomplete.

I think writing is a very political act. I think that any writer who says it's not, is simply a writer who is disavowing the political connotations of what they write.

All writers who can claim to be called 'living' must be political in a sense. They must have what the Quakers call a concern to understand what is happening in the world, and must engage themselves, in their writing, to promote no comfortable lies, of the sort which people will pay well to be told rather than the truth.

People will sometimes say, "Why don't you write more politics?" And I have to explain to them that writing the lives of women IS politics.

What I do not want to write is didactic political tracts.

there are people who read my work and accuse me of being political! As far as I'm concerned that's like accusing a dog of having a bark!

[On her political writings:] It is, I confess, very possible that these my Labours may only be destined to line Trunks, or preserve roast Meat from too fierce a Fire; yet in that Shape I shall be useful to my Country.

Does one ever read a politician's books?

It's been so long since a talented writer last occupied the White House; no wonder, then, that American writers have been among the most prominent of all the demographic groups claiming a piece of Barack Obama for themselves.

The political writer, then, is the ultimate optimist, believing people are capable of change and using words as one way to try and penetrate the privatism of our lives.

A man of the right doesn't write in the same way as a man of the left, you can see that right away, or a woman of the right or a woman of the left.

We also have a lot of the same influences - we both read a lot of the beatniks. And yet what we actually do is almost exactly the opposite. His [ Hunter S. Thompson] political stuff is just wonderful, but basically nothing happens.

I had a national and international reputation. I had written the history and articles. So I brought to the Trotskyist movement some international reputation.

Everybody in politics writes a book and the books are dull—almost as dull as the people who wrote them.

With my family background - my parents were both activists - writing about culture and politics came naturally.

The fear of a work becoming dated is one of the most effective tools for keeping people from writing political work.

I am political. But not politically active. I'm not my dad. I'll never write polemic, as he did.