Quotes About Writing

Unlike modern films where superstars dominate every scene, the Hollywood films of the golden era have depth in writing and casting, so the story can resonate with more than one tone.

Durante más de doce años, Bruce Patton ha colaborado con nosotros en redactar y explicar todas las ideas de este libro. El año pasado se hizo cargo de la difícil tarea de volcar nuestro pensamiento conjunto en un texto con el que estuviéramos todos de acuerdo. Es un placer darle la bienvenida a Bruce, editor de la primera y coautor de esta segunda edición.

You need that pride in yourself, as well as a sense, when you are sitting on Page 297 of a book, that the book is going to be read, that somebody is going to care. You can't ever be sure about that, but you need the sense that it's important, that it's not typing; it's writing.

Poor kid, I thought, to do this to yourself at twenty-three and leave a note that tells me you could have been a writer. I would have liked that for you. I would have liked that very much.

Many of my better short stories are just the last chapters of novels I did not write.

I don't know that I ever wanted greatness on its own. It seems rather like wanting to be an engineer, rather than wanting to design something - or wanting to be a writer, rather than wanting to write. It should be a by-product, not a thing in itself. Otherwise, it's just an ego trip.

The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).

Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.

I transform Work in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real Work - of writing.) for: the Work by which (it is said) we emerge from the great crises (love, grief) cannot be liquidated hastily: for me, it is accomplished only in and by writing.

There is nothing in discourse that is not to be found in a sentence.

We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

The modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now.

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

Since I've been taking care of her, the last six months in fact, she was everything for me, and I've completely forgotten that I'd written. I was no longer anything but desperately hers.

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not–this is the beginning of writing. — Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments . (Hill and Wang; Second Printing edition June 1, 1979) Originally published 1977.

Depression comes when, in the depths of despair, I cannot manage to save myself by my attachment to writing.

Aussi, le style est-il toujours un secret[...]

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things that I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely *where you are not*--that is the beginning of writing.

Elle morte, je n'avais plus aucune raison de m'accorder à la marche du Vivant supérieur (l'espèce). Ma particularité ne pourrait jamais plus s'universaliser (sinon, utopiquement, par l'écriture, dont le projet, dès lors, devait devenir l'unique but de ma vie).

La neurosis es un mal menor: no en relación con la salud sino en relación con ese imposible del que hablaba Bataille (La neurosis es la miedosa aprehensión de un fondo imposible, etc.); pero ese mal menor es el único que permite escribir (y leer).

Writing, on the contrary, is always rooted in something beyond language, it develops like a seed, not like a line, it manifests an essence and holds the threat of a secret, it is an anti­ communication, it is intimidating.

This, which is true of the literary modes of writing, in which the unity of the signs is ceaselessly fascinated by zones of infra- or ultra-language, is even truer of the political ones, in which the alibi stem­ming from language is at the same time intimidation and glorification : for it is power or conflict which produce the purest types of writing.

One writes with one's desire, and I am not through desiring.

El texto que usted escribe debe demostrarme que me desea. Esa prueba existe: es la escritura. La escritura es esto: la ciencia de los gozos del lenguaje, su kamasutra (de esta ciencia no hay más que un tratado: la escritura misma).