“If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!”
“I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent we have no future. People who do not want writers to write about violence want to stop them writing about us and our time. It would be immoral not to write about violence.”
Preface to Lear (1972; London: Methuen, 1983) p. lvii
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Edward Bond 5
English writer best known as a dramatist 1934Related quotes
On how he wants to be perceived as a writer in “Édouard Louis: 'I want to be a writer of violence. The more you talk about it, the more you can undo it'” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/09/edouard-louis-i-want-to-be-a-writer-of-violence-the-more-you-talk-about-it-the-more-you-can-undo-it in The Guardian (2018 Jun 9)
“Our age has need of violence," he writes. And he is violence.”
Source: Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
Lessons of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1990)
Violence is golden
A Sky Without Eagles (2014)
"Come on, Big Boy — Let Me See Your Manuscript," review and interview by Herbert Gold, The New York Times (1987-08-02)
On the threat of violence in “Meena Kandasamy interview: ‘I don’t know if I’m idiotic – or courageous’” https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/meena-kandasamy-interview-i-don-t-know-if-i-m-idiotic-or-courageous-9238644.html in the Independent (2014 Apr 6)
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture — it's a really stupid thing to want to do.”
This has commonly been paraphrased "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture." More info at "Alan P. Scott : Talking about music..." http://home.pacifier.com/~ascott/they/tamildaa.htm Also, Costello has denied http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/11/08/writing-about-music/ having coined this, in an interview in Q magazine, tentatively attributing the quote instead to Martin Mull.
Misattributed
Letter to Shirley Wiley (30 March 1954), in The Letters of E. B. White (1989), p. 391