Quotes About Writing

Years before, she had dreamed of writing stories as a way to escape. She could revise her life and become someone else. She could be somewhere else. In her imagination she could change everything, herself, her mother, her past. But the idea of revising her life also frightened her, as if by imagination alone she were condemning what she did not like about herself or others. Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.

When we as writers take our fears, beliefs, imaginations, and research and offer them up for the Lord to use, we are changed, and our fiction carries the power of truth and the fingerprints of our God on every page.

Quienes no escriben no saben lo bonito que es escribir. Antes siempre me lamentaba por no saber dibujar, pero ahora estoy mas que contenta de que al menos sé escribir. Y si no llego a tener talento para escribir en los periódicos o para escribir libros, pues bien, siempre me queda la opción de escribir para mí misma

podré escribir algo grande algún día? ¡Llegaré algún día a ser periodista y escritora?

I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.

Don't wait for it, I said. Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. Create. And then the love will come to you, then it comes to you. It was only when I wrote my first book that the world I wanted to live in opened to me.

The woman will sit eternally in the tall black armchair. I will be the one woman you will never have... excessive living weighs down the imagination: we will not live, we will only write and talk to swell the sails.

I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife.

This morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have just spat out my heart.

The homosexuals wrote as if they were women. The timid ones wrote about orgies. The frigid ones about frenzied fulfill-ments. The most poetic ones indulged in pure bestiality and the purest ones in perversions. We were haunted by the marvelous tales we could not tell. We sat around, imagined this old man, talked of how much we hated him, because he would not allow us to make a fusion of sexuality and feeling, sensuality and emotion.

Anaïs Nin noted in her diary: "The same thing which makes Henry indestructible is what makes me indestructible: It is that at the core of us is a writer, not a human being.

Y]ou have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.

No rest for me anywhere. No rest from writing, awareness, insights, memories, fantasies, analogies, free associations. Writing becomes imperative for a surcharged head.

I will be the one woman you will never have . . . excessive living weighs down the imagination: we will not live, we will only write and talk to swell the sails.

I thought of my difficulties with writing, my struggles to articulate feelings not easily expressed. Of my struggles to find a language for intuition, feelings, instincts which are, in themselves, elusive, subtle, and wordless.

There is a danger, if one doesn't write habitually, that one will lose the habit. I am always in fear of that. And when you are thinking constantly, writing in your head, writing while you undress, wash your teeth, scrub the dishes, etc. you get roiled and everything turns to mud.

It is[…] true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to receive,to nourish yourself, and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you,sweeps you into experience and into writing.

It is impossible to make my portrait because of my mobility. I am not photogenic because of my mobility. Peace, serenity, and integration are unknown to me. My familiar climate is anxiety. I write as I breathe, naturally, flowingly, spontaneously, out of an overflow, not as a substitute for life. I am more interested in human beings than in writing, more interested in lovemaking than in writing, more interested in living than in writing.

I put artistic values above all others. Because writing, for me, is an expanded world, a limitless world, containing all.

Henry's daily and continuous flow of life, his sexual activity, his talks with everyone, his café life, his conversations with people in the street, which I once considered an interruption to writing, I now believe to be a quality which distinguishes him from other writers. He never writes in cold blood: he is always writing in white heat.

We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection... We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it... We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely.

I had to go out and drink a little because I was going nutty writing this stuff. You can't imagine what a turmoil is in my head, how much I want to say, and how little is coming out. My head is bursting.

Read the Golden Ass of Apuleius and Les Diaboliques in French." . . . "Go to Russian Church on Rue Crimée for the music." . . . "Get back the first volume of Albertine and make annotations . . . write copiously, there is time for everything" . . . "Read Jacques Maritain.

I don't send you any more pages because they're not finished. I'm searching for a phrase that will release everything that's pent up in me.