Quotes About Writing

What is clear to me, always, is that the writing must never lose sight of truth as its ultimate goal. Page after page, the drive to capture what is true, and not what resembles the truth, shapes the work. If, even for a few passages, the tone becomes false—that is, too studied, too limpid, too regimented, too well-phrased—I am obliged to stop and to figure out where I started to go wrong. If I can't, I throw everything away.

Without reserve, I can say that my entire identity is in the books I write.

At the time I also considered myself a lowly, abject woman. I was afraid, as I said, that it was precisely my female nature that kept me from bringing the pen as close as possible to the pain I wanted to express. For a woman who has something to say, does it really tkae a miracle — I said to myself — to dissolve the margins within which nature has enclosed her and shower herself in her own words to the world?

un buen relato es el que se escribe desde el fondo de nuestra vida

I wrote my book to free myself from it, not to be its prisoner.

Dealings with the world, yes, at any time they are entirely ours. But the words--the written form in which we enclose them, attentive to the red margins of our notebooks--are not. We have to accept the fact that no word is truly ours. We have to give up the idea that writing miraculously releases a voice of our own, a tonality of our own: in my view that is a lazy way of talking about writing. Writing is, rather, entering an immense cemetery where every tomb is waiting to be profaned.

esto ocurre cuando en la cabeza tienes un clamor y sigues escribiendo como al dictado, incluso cuando estás haciendo la compra

El reto para quien escribe es llenar la distancia entre lo que vives y lo que cuentas, sentir físicamente el impacto de la narración... A menudo, empezamos a escribir demasiado pronto y las páginas aún están frías. Solo cuando la historia se acopla a nosotros como un guante, ha llegado el momento de contarla.

el momento en que la escritura parece cuidarse únicamente de sacar adelante la historia. Es ahí donde radica por completo la alegría de escribir.

En los momentos de crisis, con mucha frecuencia las mujeres tratamos de calmarnos escribiendo.

A woman who wants to write has unavoidably to deal not only with the entire literary patrimony she's been brought up on and in virtue of which she wants to and can express herself but with the fact that that patrimony is essentially male and by its nature doesn't provide true female sentences.

I believe that, for those who love to write, time spent writing is never wasted. And then isn't it from book to book that we approach the book that we really want to write?

I felt that not only in my book but in novels in general there was something that truly agitated me, a bare and throbbing heart . . . But was that what I wanted? To write, to write with purpose, to write better than I had already? And to study the stories of the past and the present to understand how they worked, and to learn, learn everything about the world with the sole purpose of constructing living hearts . . .

el diario me provocaba un afán de verdad. Pensaba que en la escritura no tenía sentido contenerse, de ahí que escribiera

Where is it written that lives should have a meaning? So she began to disparage all that struggle of mine to write. She said mockingly: Is the meaning that line of black markings that look like insect shit?

writing with truth is really difficult, perhaps impossible.

Si lo que leo o escribo me gusta, no pego ojo; si me disgusta, caigo en un sueño frágil de decepción y descontento.

Why was I worried? Because if, in everyday life, I was so embarrassed, so cautious, that I scarcely breathed, the diary produced in me a craving for truth. I thought that when one writes, it makes no sense to be contained, to censor oneself, and as a result I wrote mostly—maybe only—about what I would have preferred to be silent about, resorting among other things to a vocabulary that I would never have dared to use in speaking. This

Beautiful writing becomes beautiful when it loses its harmony and has the desperate power of the ugly. And characters? I feel they are false when they exhibit clear coherence and I become passionate about them when they say one thing and do another.

Reading brought on a desire to write, and writing brought on a desire to read.

The struggle is due to the fact that the present — the entire present — even that of the "I" who writes, letter by letter — can't maintain with clarity the thought-vision, which always comes before, is always the past, and therefore tends to be blotted out.

The hue itself, moreover, that certain emotions take on is of unimportant duration, the one who is writing knows. As soon as you look for words, the slowness becomes a whirlwind and the colors get mixed together like the colors of different fruits in a blender.

And I imagined that I was in a race against time, a race in which the writer always lagged behind. While, in fact, the letters were rapidly lining up next to one another, asserting themselves, the vision fled, and writing was destined to a frustrating approximation. It was too slow to capture the brain wave.

Je reste convaincue que « je te hais » possède une force et une honnêteté sentimentale que n'a pas « je te hais !!! ». Dans l'écriture au moins, il faudrait éviter de faire comme ces fous qui gouvernent le monde et qui menacent, trafiquent, traitent et, quand ils gagnent, exultent, en truffant leurs discours de ces minuscules missiles à tête nucléaire qui concluent chacune de leurs misérables phrases.