Quotes About Writing

You don't write for success. That takes part of your attention away from the writing. If you're really doing it, that's all you're doing: writing. There's an unwritten compact between you and the reader.

You don't write for success. That takes part of your attention away from the writing. If you're really doing it, that's all you're doing: writing.

Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You'll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I'm still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don't worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told.

Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You'll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I'm still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don't worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told.

Inertia is, perhaps, the single most powerful stumbling block to writing. It takes energy, courage, patience, and commitment to keep writing in your journal. It's no small thing to open doors, let down barriers, enter sealed rooms, and walk obscure avenues of memory that haven't been traveled in years—or perhaps ever been traveled.

For many writers, the journal is their opportunity to be honest with them- selves—the greatest test of all.

Les diría que escribieran una nota de despedida de ciento cincuenta palabras, como si fueran a suicidarse. Sería un buen modo de animarles a pensar en la vida en sí, pues Samuel Johnson dijo que pensar que nos van a ahorcar a la mañana siguiente centra la mente de una manera maravillosa.

After the first glass of vodka you can accept just about anything of life even your own mysteriousness you think it is nice that a box of matches is purple and brown and is called La Petite and comes from Sweden for they are words that you know and that is all you know words not their feelings or what they mean and you write because you know them not because you understand them because you don't you are stupid and lazy and will never be great but you do what you know because what else is there?

I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.

Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don't surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it every moment.

Writing is a deeper sleep than death. Just as one wouldn't pull a corpse from its grave, I can't be dragged from my desk at night.

Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.

There can be no more beautiful spot to die in, no spot more worthy of total despair, than one's own novel.

But I will write in spite of everything, absolutely; it is my struggle for self-preservation.

I am away from home and must always write home, even if any home of mine has long since floated away into eternity.

In a way, I was safe writing

What is written is merely the dregs of experience.

You've seen yourself how difficult the writing is to decipher with your eyes, but our man deciphers it with his wounds.

This afternoon the pain occasioned by my loneliness came upon me so piercingly and intensely that I became aware that the strength which I gain through this writing thus spends itself, a strength which I certainly have not intended for this purpose.

You once said that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all.

Ich schreibe anders als ich rede, ich rede anders als ich denke, ich denke anders als ich denken soll und so geht es weiter bis ins tiefste Dunkel.

when I try to write down something like the following, the swords whose points surround me in a circle, begin slowly to approach the body, it's the most complete torture; when they begin to graze me, I don't mean pierce, when they merely begin to graze me it's already so terrible that I immediately, at the first scream, betray you, myself, everything.

I have now, and have had since this afternoon, a great yearning to write all of my anxiety entirely out of me.

When I say something, this thing immediately and definitively loses its importance. When I write it down, it also loses it, but sometimes gains another importance.