Quotes About Writing

I think of writing now as a long, tiring, pleasant seduction. The stories that you tell, the words that you use and refine, the characters you try to give life to are merely tools with which you circle around the elusive, unnamed, shapeless thing that belongs to you alone, and which nevertheless is a sort of key to all the doors, the real reason that you spend so much of your life sitting at a table tapping away, filling pages.

When she gave me back the notebook, she said, 'You're very clever, of course they always give you ten.' I felt that there was no irony, it was a real compliment. Then she added with sudden harshness: 'I don't want to read anything else that you write.' 'Why?' She thought about it. 'Because it hurts me,' and she struck her forehead with her hand and burst out laughing.

deprimidos no escriben libros. Los escriben las personas contentas, que viajan, que están enamoradas y que hablan, y hablan con la convicción de que de un modo u otro las palabras acaben siempre en el lugar correcto.

Lila is right, one writes not so much to write, one writes to inflict pain on those who wish to inflict pain. The pain of words against the pain of kicks and punches and the instruments of death.

No se escribe por escribir, se escribe para hacer daño a quien se quiere hacer daño. Un daño de palabras contra un daño de puñetazos, patadas e instrumentos de muerte.

But stamped on her face was also regret that she had been wrong in her assessment. In those weeks she felt humiliated at having always ascribed a power to things that in the current hierarchies were insignificant: the alphabet, writing, books. Only then—I think today—did she, who seemed so disillusioned, so adult, come to the end of her childhood.

Disse che la faccia schifosa delle cose non bastava a scrivere un romanzo: senza fantasia non pareva una faccia vera, ma una maschera.

Yes, it's Lila who makes writing difficult. My life forces me to imagine what hers would have been if what happened to me had happened to her, what use she would have made of my luck.

Para escribir hay que desear que algo te sobreviva.

Don't be timid. You're a writer, use your role, test it, make something of it. These are decisive times, everything is turning upside down. Participate, be present. And begin with the scum in your area, put their backs to the wall.

E poi amavo la scrittura di chi ti fa affacciare da ogni rigo per guardare di sotto e sentire la vertigine della profondità, la nerezza dell'inferno.

Para escrever é preciso desejar que alguma coisa sobreviva a ti

Writing requires maximum ambition, maximum audacity, and programmatic disobedience.

The depressed don't write books. People who are happy write, people who travel, are in love, and talk and talk with the conviction that, one way or another, their words always go to the right place.

In other words, the cultural education of any high-school student should include an introduction to the idea that a writer adapts his writing to ever-changing expressive needs and that a higher or lower note doesn't mean that the singer has changed.

Tem a ver, sempre e apenas, com nós duas: ela que quer que eu dê aquilo que a sua natureza e as circunstâncias a impediram de dar, e eu que não consigo dar aquilo que ela pretende; ela que se irrita com a minha insuficiência, e por represália me quer reduzir a nada, como fez consigo mesma, e eu que passei meses e meses e meses a escrever, para lhe dar uma forma que não perca os contornos, e lhe bater, e a acalmar, e assim por minha vez me acalmar.

Lila's world, as usual, rapidly superimposed itself on mine. Everything that I had written in July and August seemed to me trivial, I was seized by a frenzy to redeem myself.

I left. Just now that I was becoming a writer, there was no one in the entire neighborhood capable of saying: What an extraordinary thing you've done.

Volevo scrivere storie piene di spifferi.

I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story yet in fact are nothing, nothing of mine, nothing that has really begun or really been brought to completion, only a tangled knot, and nobody, not even she who at this moment is writing, knows if it contains the right thread for a story or is merely a snarled confusion of suffering, without redemption.

No quiero leer nada más de lo que escribes. -¿Por qué? -Porque me hace daño

Los libros se escriben para hacerse oír, no para quedarse callados.

She expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but – further – she left no trace of effort, you weren't aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, heard her. The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face; it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, the confusion of the oral.

se sentiu humilhada por ter passado a vida atribuindo um poder a coisas que, nas hierarquias ordinárias, contavam muito pouco: o alfabeto, a escrita, os livros.