Writing Tradition Quotes

I come from a long line of people that write. My folks ran a weekly newspaper.

Being a writer is part of a noble tradition, as is being a musician – the last egalitarian and open associations. No matter what happens in terms of fame and fortune, dedication to writing is a marching-step forward from where you were before, when you didn’t care about reaching out to the world, when you weren’t hoping to contribute, when you were just standing there doing some job into which you had fallen.

Every writer is a writer of the generation before.

The whole 'starting with stories, ending with novels' thing, it's probably too ingrained in the industry and the psyche to change it.

I'm a brown girl from a Punjabi pind raised in Toronto. I don't expect literary critics and purists to understand the nuances of my experiences, and the experiences of the people around me... And my tradition holds that there is a magic in the written word. So how I write, what I write of, and why I write all comes naturally.

I was writing poems when I was young, you know, because my father was a poet, so it was absolutely normal to follow my father.

For me, as a writer who comes from quite a naturalistic tradition, British screenwriting is quite delicate, quite small, and rarified in a way.

I'm passing on a tradition of which I am part. There's a long line of poets who went before me, and I'm another one, and I'm hoping to pass that on to other younger, or newer, poets than myself.

There is ... scarcely any species of writing of which we can tell what is its essence, and what are its constituents; every new genius produces some innovation, which, when invented and approved, subverts the rules which the practice of foregoing authors had established.

Because the more you write the more you're aware of the weight of your tradition and the difficulties of the form and the more you have already done that you do not want to do again.

We have a strong tradition in Toronto of really great film writers, and growing up in that climate is a big reason I pursued cinema studies.

I grew up on British fiction, and I write perhaps more directly out of that tradition.