Michael Pollan Writing Quotations

Fairness forces you - even when you're writing a piece highly critical of, say, genetically modified food, as I have done - to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately as you possibly can.

Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.

I really try to write as an ordinary person would, not as someone who's too sophisticated about food, or too knowledgeable about things.

I try to write in the first person - the first person not of a journalist but of a carnivore, an eater, a gardener, someone trying to figure out what to feed his family.

Yes, I very much like to have a personal stake in what I'm writing about.

Anyway, in my writing I've always been interested in finding places to stand, and I've found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I'm writing about.

My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me.

Experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing.

There's an assumption that if someone writes in the first person it's self-indulgent and self-regarding. I just look at it as a tool to understand the world and my experience in it. It's not a tool to understand myself.

I don't like writing as an expert. I like writing as an amateur. I like writing as an idiot. It's much more fun to start in ignorance.

I get letters from classes all the time. Say it's assigned in someone's 8th grade class, and the teacher asks everyone to write a letter to me about their impressions and what they learned. So, it's incredibly gratifying to hear.