“Would you not like to try all sorts of lives — one is so very small — but that is the satisfaction of writing — one can impersonate so many people.”

—  Katherine Mansfield

Letter to Sylvia Payne (24 April 1906), from The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield (1984-1996), vol. I

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Would you not like to try all sorts of lives — one is so very small — but that is the satisfaction of writing — one can…" by Katherine Mansfield?
Katherine Mansfield photo
Katherine Mansfield 43
New Zealand author 1888–1923

Related quotes

Meg Cabot photo

“Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.”

Meg Cabot (1967) Novelist

“When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.”

Dodie Smith book I Capture the Castle

Source: I Capture the Castle

“One would have thought that the notion of an impersonal critic was as patently absurd as that of an impersonal person: yet playwrights still cherish it as a sort of holy ideal. Admittedly, we all make mystiques: but this one is particularly wishful. The man who asks for an anonymous, impersonal criticism is trying to elevate criticism to the status of a science; whereas it is, I am afraid, only an art. The critic's business is to write readable English: the playwright's to write speakable English. Beyond that it is every man for himself.”

Kenneth Tynan (1927–1980) English theatre critic and writer

"George Jean Nathan" (1953), p. 61
Profiles (1990)

Chi­ma­man­da Ngo­zi Adi­chie photo

“Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living.”

Chi­ma­man­da Ngo­zi Adi­chie (1977) Nigerian writer

On Money and wealth
Source: https://sheleadsafrica.org/20-powerful-chimamanda-adichie-quotes-for-todays-boss-women/

William Eubank photo

“Making or writing a movie, to me, is like building a watch because a watch is so small and you only can fit so many things inside it that all the pieces really do need to work together.”

William Eubank (1982) American film director

[Eubank, William, Ash Thorp, Episode 182 — William Eubank, Interview (event occurs at 43:37–43:50), https://www.thecollectivepodcast.com/episodes/182-william-eubank, MP3; 1h 44m, The Collective Podcast, Los Angeles, California, June 25, 2018, 2018, June]

Nelson Algren photo

“Living in a very dense area, you're conscious of how the people underneath live, and you have a certain feeling toward them – so much so that you'd rather live among them than with the business classes. In a historical sense, it might be related to an idea, but you write out of – well, I wouldn't call it indignation, but a kind of irritability that these people on top should be so contented, so absolutely unaware of these other people, and so sure that their values are the right ones. I mean, there's a certain satisfaction in recording the people underneath, whose values are as sound as theirs, and a lot funnier, and a lot truer in a way. There's a certain overall satisfaction in kind of scooping up a shovelful of these people and dumping them in somebody's parlor.”

Nelson Algren (1909–1981) American novelist, short story writer

"The Art of Fiction No. 11" (1955)

Hilaire Belloc photo

“The Microbe is so very small
You cannot make him out at all,
But many sanguine people hope
To see him through a microscope.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

"The Microbe"
More Beasts for Worse Children (1897)

Albert Camus photo

“So many men are deprived of grace. How can one live without grace? One has to try it and do what Christianity never did: be concerned with the damned.”

Albert Camus (1913–1960) French author and journalist

Notebooks (1942–1951)

Cormac McCarthy photo

“No one can tell you what your life is goin to be, can they?

No.

It's never like what you expected.

Quijada nodded. If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

Source: The Crossing

“The world has so many poems in it, it has never seemed to me very smart to force one more upon the world. If there isn’t one there to write, you just leave it alone.”

A.R. Ammons (1926–2001) American poet

Paris Review interview (1996)
Context: Unless I have something already moving through the mind, I don’t go to the typewriter at all. The world has so many poems in it, it has never seemed to me very smart to force one more upon the world. If there isn’t one there to write, you just leave it alone.

Related topics