Writing Maturity Quotes

It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, "What should I write at the age of sixty-four," but never, "What should I write in 1940."

They say you hit your stride as a writer at about 50. I'm hoping to do that.

I look at my first books and am glad they weren't published.... You start writing by imitating your heroes, then you keep the heart of that worship in your work. As time goes by, you get other influences and find your own voice.

My writing has developed drastically . The Return of the Prodigal Son is the most important thing I've done, and my most mature book.

When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a 'good writer.' Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn't mean I always write well.

I think the narratives on 'Trans,' 'Plans,' and 'Narrow Stairs' moved away from the way I wrote on the first couple of records, which was a lot more impressionistic. I was writing those songs in my early 20s, so I thought I was being more clear than I actually was.

Anything I wrote before the age of 17 is probably worth putting a pin in and moving on.

I think when I first started out, I had a kind of an exuberance about language, comedy, narrative leaps that... stopped just short of non sequiturs. And I'm much more cautious now.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years at least.

You can't be too old to be a writer, but you can definitely be too young!

Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.

It's true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.

Don’t be in too much of a rush to be published. There is enormous value in listening and reading and writing—and then putting your words away for weeks or months–and then returning to your work to polish it some more.

Even when I think I'm writing really young, they say it's too mature.

I do believe that as you write more and age, the arrogance and most of the vanity goes. Or it is a vanity met with vast gratitude, that you were hit by something as you stood in the way of it, that anybody is listening.

I started writing seriously about 1960, at the fairly advanced age of 30.

One likes to think one grows as a writer as one ages, else all you get is an 'old' young writer. Beyond that is the changing landscape of the universe and the stories I choose to tell.

If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with words.

A whole bunch of agents and editors looked at my stories, and they all said, in effect, 'You're a pretty good writer and you should probably get these published; when you grow up and write a novel, get in touch.'

Writers are opposite of athletes, they get better with age

I started to write when I was eighteen or nineteen. However, until I was about twenty-three, I didn't take it that seriously.

I'm not embarrassed about the novels I wrote when I was younger, but I couldn't write them today because of my religion.

Good authors mature over time: it does take awhile.

I always wanted to write. But honestly I'm glad I didn't do it back when I was twenty-five or so, when it's now clear to me that I was a very poor writer and could've ruined my career before it even started.

I teach at Duke, and I have students who are all of twenty who want to write memoirs, and you know it's all pretty interesting stuff, but a lot of them lack gravitas, you know.