Quotes About Writing

We write to taste life twice

I think now that at the root of all my writing lies the fact that very early in life I lost the desire to participate with others on the basis laid down by society. All I have been doing, possibly, in my work, is to protest and explain wherein I'm different.

Para un escritor, un personaje es un ser con quien no se siente ligado por el sentimiento. El verdadero amor destruye la «literatura». Por eso, también, Henry no puede escribir sobre mí, y quizá nunca escriba sobre mí —por lo menos, hasta que nuestro amor se acabe y, entonces, yo me convierta en un «personaje», es decir, en una personalidad alejada, no fundida con él.

Make the Last Book the first of a series—a life job, like Proust's.

t is surprising how well one writes if one thinks no one will read. –

It is surprising how well one writes if one thinks no one will read.

One of my notes says: "Correct Anaïs' English." Do you want me to do that, or would Hugo consider that I am encroaching on his private domain?

I refer to all you write about Cocteau, [Eugene] Jolas & Goethe—with the changefulness of tone, the mockery of the "pomp" in the next paragraph.)

The diary had been her refuge, her workshop, and the act of writing her only stabilizer. "The journal is a product of the disease, perhaps an accentuation and exaggeration of it. I speak of relief when I write—perhaps—but it is also an engraving of pain, a tattooing on myself, a prolongation of pain.

Él cuenta con que yo entenderé, porque yo, como él, soy escritora. He de saber. Debe estar claro para mí. Para su sorpresa, le digo exactamente lo que tú dices: «No es lo mismo.» Hay un mundo eternamente cerrado para él, el mundo que contiene nuestras conversaciones abstractas, nuestros besos, nuestros éxtasis.

P.S. The excerpts will follow in the next mail. Just read Unamuno! My Unamuno! Where is that tragic sense of life? I want it. I may write on Gide's Dostoevsky tomorrow. Everything is stirring in me—Fraenkel, Proust, Unamuno, Osborn, Lawrence

the writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement.

The pages were all right—neither good nor bad, neither fish nor fowl. As I read them I seemed to hear the original lines from which they were abstracted, saw the wavering handwriting, and the curious childlike drawings, the mistakes, the bad spelling, the ink spots, the greasy finger-prints, the cheap paper (which is so touching in itself—the cheapest for genius always!). I rebelled

It doesn't matter whether one is for or against—the writing it is all that counts.

Don't tear anything up: it creates blanks, silences—like the dashes of [Paul] Valéry.

He was furious and hurt to think of a Nin woman having been within reach of those Jews with their tongues hanging out etc. But I told him it didn't hurt me—I wrote a novel!

Incidentally, this is one of the worst defects in all the journal writing—this tacking on of recently digested syntheses. No syntheses, please! And in the finished work, no slippery escapes, no short, pithy, ambiguous lines or sentences. Full out, or else nothing.

We need only to sharpen up the implements. I can see you giving birth to books in rapid succession. I believe in you enormously—I was genuinely stirred—also exasperated.

I will never settle down, never have a home. My symbol is a roving ship. I am a writer. I would rather have been a courtesan. the rest is in the diary

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth.

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." "I feel doomed to

A writer could completely baffle a psychologist." A writer and a woman, a woman with imagination, too, and a psychologist half blinded. Oh yea?

You ought to write my books. How can anybody do anything in three weeks? To do that one must be a god. God took a week to create the world. I take my hat off to him too. It's stupendous. Unbelievable. Let it stay that way.

I love the sharing. I feel with extraordinary vividness your presence, as if you were reading with me. I actually experience again the sensation of my leaning over your shoulder and kissing your hair and neck while you are reading or writing.