Quotes About Writing

Literary genres are safe areas, solid platforms. There I can place a pale sketch of a story and practise with calm, wary pleasure. But really I am waiting for my brain to get distracted, to slip up, for other I's — many — outside the margins to join together, take my hand, begin to pull me with the writing where I'm afraid to go, where it hurts me to go, where, if I go too far, I won't necessarily know how to get back.

For me true writing is that: not an elegant, studied gesture but a convulsive act.

Over time, writing has come to mean giving shape to a permanent balancing and unbalancing of myself, arranging fragments in a frame and waiting to mix them up.

Everything, in writing, has a long history behind it. Even my uprising, my spilling over the margins, my yearning is part of an eruption that came before me and goes beyond me. Thus when I talk about my "I" who writes, I should immediately add that I'm talking about my "I" who has read (even when it's a question of distracted reading, the trickiest kind of reading).

When one stops writing one becomes oneself again, the person one usually is, in terms of occupations, thoughts, language. Thus I am now me again, I am here, I go about my ordinary business, I have nothing to do with the book, or, to be exact, I entered it, but I can no longer enter it.

Das Schreiben ist kein Genuss. Es ist das Quälende. Etwas, was man tut, wie Kotzen. Man muss es tun, obwohl man es eigentlich nicht will.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation, and it seems most true when it eschews artistic devices of any sort.

I have no sounds that could serve to soothe me, no violoncello like him, no lament that anyone would recognize as a lament because it sounds subdued, in an inexpressibly tender language. I have only these lines on the yellowish paper and words that are never new, for they keep saying the same thing through an entire life.

His meals were always punctual. Whether she cooked well or badly he did not know; it was a matter of total indifference to him. During his meals, which he ate at his writing desk, he was busy with important considerations. As a rule he would not have been able to say what precisely he had in his mouth. He reserved consciousness for real thoughts; they depend upon it; without consciousness, thoughts are unthinkable. Chewing and digestion happen of themselves.

There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them.

Well, that's just it, I thought: you didn't just write down a raw cry of suffering. It would be boring and self-indulgent. You had to disguise it, turn it into art. That's what literature was. That was what required talent, and made people want to read what you wrote, and then they would give you money.

Like all the stories I wrote at that time, it was based on an unusual atmosphere that had impressed me in real life. I thought that was the point of writing stories: to make up a chain of events that would somehow account for a certain mood—for how it came about and for what it led to.

That had probably been written by a professor. I recognized the professor's characteristic delight at not imparting information.

I would never write about that. It was enough I had wasted the time once. I would never waste more time by writing about it.

Of course, it wasn't possible to account for all the time. By the time you had written down what time it was, it was already later than it had been.

Essays can be such a pain! Basically, the reader isn't on your side, so you can't leave out any of the logical steps. And sometimes when a connection is delicate, the steps take too long to spell out–it just isn't possible, by the time you get to the end of the steps, the mood is lost.

Why were we all so bad at writing stories? When would it get better?

I had a deep conviction that I was good at writing, and that in some way I already was a writer, this conviction was completely independent of my having ever written anything, or being able to imagine ever writing anything, that I thought anyone would like to read.

Microsoft Word was for kids, but the typewriter was God, the desk shook with each keystroke.

Well, it made sense. If she could write a book, he would be out of a job. That's why Madame Bovary had to be too dumb and banal to write Madame Bovary: so Flaubert could have a great humane moment where he said he was Madame Bovary. But I wasn't dumb or banal, and I lived in the future. Nobody was going to trick me into marrying some loser, and even if they did, I would write the goddamn book myself.

All writers, I think, are to one extent or another, damaged people. Writing is our way of repairing ourselves.

Literature is the product of a deep-seated need for honesty. Hence, those who lie most are struck most deeply by it, and those who are honest have no need for it.

Contemplation and writing demand solitude, which leads to a sorry feeling of isolation and detachment. Writers try to call their loneliness genius, and the world believes them most of the time.