Quotes About Writing

A good style simply doesn't form unless you absorb half a dozen top flight authors every year. Or rather it forms but, instead of being a subconscious amalgam of all that you have admired, it is simply a reflection of the last writer you have read, a watered-down journaleese.

I wish I was in print. It will be odd a year or so from now when Scottie assures her friends I was an author and finds that no book is procurable.

The young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

Escribí sin odio contra el lenguaje del odio y contra la desmemoria y el olvido tramado por quienes tratan de inventarse una historia al servicio de su proyecto y sus convicciones totalitarias.

In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.

As I walk, I construct perfect sentences that I cannot remember later at home. I don't know if the ineffable poetry of those sentences derived from what they were or from their never having been (written).

Writing is like paying myself a formal visit…

To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life.

Escrever é esquecer. A literatura é a maneira mais agradável de ignorar a vida

To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation. If a man writes well only when he's drunk, then I'll tell him: Get drunk. And if he says that it's bad for his liver, I'll answer: What's your liver? A dead thing that lives while you live, whereas the poems you write live without while.

We know that the book we will never write will be bad. Even worse will be the one we put off writing. At least the book that has been written exists.

Perhaps it's my destiny to remain a bookkeeper forever, and for poetry and literature to remain simply butterflies that alight on my head and underline my own ridiculousness by their very beauty. In the future I'll be living quietly in a little house somewhere, enjoying a peaceful existence not writing the book I'm not writing now and, so as to continue not doing so, I will use different excuses to the ones I use now to avoid actually confronting myself.

Autopsychography The poet is a man who feigns And feigns so thoroughly, at last He manages to feign as pain The pain he really feels, And those who read what once he wrote Feel clearly, in the pain they read, Neither of the pains he felt, Only a pain they cannot sense. And thus, around its jolting track There runs, to keep our reason busy, The circling clockwork train of ours That men agree to call a heart.

My self-critical mind allows me to see only the defects and faults in my own work, and so I only have the courage to write snippets and snatches, brief notes on the theme of nonexistence, and yet even the little I write is imperfect.

However, when you're about to write something, knowing beforehand that it's sure to be imperfect, a failure, that is the most spiritually tormenting and humiliating of feelings. I not only feel that the lines I write are unsatisfactory, I know that I will find any lines I write in the future equally unsatisfactory

I'd like to write the encomium of a new incoherence that could serve as the negative charter for the new anarchy of souls.

It sometimes occurs to me, with sad delight, that if one day (in a future I won't be part of) the sentences I write are read and admired, then at last I'll have my own kin, people who 'understand' me, my true family in which to be born and loved. But far from being born into it, I'll have already died long ago. I'll be understood only in effigy, when affection can no longer compensate for the indifference that was the dead man's lot in life.

Se escrevo o que sinto é porque assim diminuo a febre de sentir.

The nobleman thinks clearly, writes clearly, and controls his emotions, though not his feelings; the bookkeeper controls neither emotions nor feelings, and what he thinks depends on what he feels.

Better and happier those who, recognizing that everything is fictitious, write the novel before someone writes it for them and, like Machiavelli, don courtly garments to write in secret.

No soy nadie, nadie. No sé sentir, no sé pensar, no sé querer. Soy un personaje de novela por escribir, que pasa por el aire, deshecho sin haber existido, entre sueños de quien no me ha sabido formular.

peacefully ensconced in a small house on the outskirts of somewhere or other, enjoying a tranquillity in which I won't write the works I don't write now, and to keep on not writing them I'll come up with even better excuses than the ones I use today to elude myself.

Tenho por irmãos os criadores da consciência do mundo - o dramaturgo atabalhoado W. Shakespeare, o mestre-escola J. Milton, o vadio Dante Alighieri, e, até, se a citação se permite, aquele Jesus Cristo que não foi nada no mundo... O que escrevo hoje é muito melhor do que o poderiam escrever os melhores.

To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life. Music lulls us, the visual arts enliven us, the performing arts (such as dance and drama) entertain us.