Art & Creativity Quote by Daniel J. Boorstin

Boorstin’s line lands because it stitches together two reputations that rarely share a sentence: the sober authority of the historian and the private chaos of the person producing “authority.” “I write to discover what I think” is a confession disguised as method. It rejects the fantasy that scholars arrive with finished conclusions, then simply transcribe them into polished prose. For Boorstin, writing isn’t a delivery system for certainty; it’s the laboratory where certainty is tested, revised, and sometimes abandoned.

Then comes the kicker: “After all, the bars aren’t open that early.” It’s not just a dad joke about morning discipline. It’s a sly acknowledgment of the temptations and evasions that circle intellectual work. If thinking is uncomfortable, procrastination is always available; if it’s not available, you write. The humor does real rhetorical labor: it punctures academic solemnity, making the claim about process feel honest rather than self-important. He’s also performing a kind of anti-pretension, reassuring readers (and students) that confusion isn’t a moral failure; it’s the starting point.

Context matters: Boorstin made his career explaining how societies manufacture images, narratives, and “pseudo-events.” This quote mirrors that critique at the personal level. Before the historian can map the myths a culture tells itself, he has to admit how messy it is to assemble meaning at all. The quip is an inoculation against dogma: if your ideas only appear when you write them into being, you’re less likely to worship them as timeless truth.