Alain de Botton Writing Quotations

I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.

The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.

My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.

I know a lot about writing, but I don't know much about how other industries work. I've tried to use my naivety to my advantage.

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.

Being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say...but writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that the impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence.

Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.

As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

An understandable hunger for ... potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, ... immune to the methods of factory farming.

It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.

Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.