Give me hunger, pain and want, Shut me out with shame and failure From your doors of gold and fame, Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger! But leave me a little love.
Carl SandburgRead
I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects the deep commitment and passion required to pursue a creative career, contrasting it with the risks of failure and disillusionment.
Carl Sandburg's quote encapsulates the struggle and determination involved in pursuing a career as a writer. It highlights the idea that a true artist must be all in, embracing both the potential for greatness and the pitfalls of failure, suggesting that in creative pursuits, the stakes are incredibly high, forcing one to fully commit to their craft or risk becoming lost and unfulfilled.
Themes
WritingCommitmentFailureArtCreativity
In practice
Example use cases
An aspiring writer might quote this to friends to express their passion for writing despite its challenges.
More from Carl Sandburg
All quotes βNothing happens... but first a dream.
Carl SandburgRead
Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today. Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction. See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.
Carl SandburgRead
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.
Carl SandburgRead
There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.
Carl SandburgRead
A liar goes in fine clothes, a liar goes in rags, a liar is a liar, clothes or no clothes.
Carl SandburgRead
Similar quotes
Pictures aren't made out of doctrines. Since the appearance of impressionism, the official salons, which used to be brown, have become blue, green, and red...But peppermint or chocolate, they are still confections.
Claude MonetRead
True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.
Yevgeny ZamyatinRead
There are a couple of strategies for writing about an absence or writing about a loss. One can create the person that was lost, develop the character of the fiancee. There's another strategy that one can employ, maybe riskier... Make the reader suffer the loss of the character in a more literal way.
Junot DiazRead
Every actor has to make terrible films from time to time, but the trick is never to be terrible in them.
Christopher LeeRead
The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where "open form" or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term "heightened speech".
James FentonRead
One of the nice things about the Internet is you can do a comic that's just for Ph.D. students, or for truck drivers, and you get to reach all of them without having to satisfy the other 99%.
Randall MunroeRead