Quotes About Writing

But when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right horizontally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew.

I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web.

I had decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover.

It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation.

I love you because you are me ... my writing, my desire to be many lives. I will be a little god in my small way. My happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper. I am justifying my life, my keen emotion, my feeling, by turning it into print.

I write only because There is a voice within me That will not be still.

I needed experience. How Could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die?

Her ambition to write stories was the most visible burden of her life.

I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have.

Writing sharpens life; life enriches writing.

All through June the writing course had stretched before me like a bright, safe bridge over the dull gulf of summer. Now I saw it totter and dissolve, and a body in a white blouse and green skirt plummet into the gap.

Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.

And just now I pick up the blessed diary of Virginia Woolf which I bought with a battery of her novels Saturday with Ted. And she works off her depression over rejections from Harper's (no less!—and I hardly can believe that the Big Ones get rejected, too!) by cleaning out the kitchen. And cooks haddock & sausage. Bless her. I feel my life linked to her, somehow. I love her.

And by the way, everything in life is writeable if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The greatest threat to creativity is self-doubt.

My writing, my desire to be many lives. I will be a little god in my small way. My happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper. I am justifying my life, my keen emotion, my feeling, by turning it into print.

Every day, writing. No matter how bad. Something will come.

Dziewicza strona, bia?a. Pierwsza skalana i odrzucona. Wszystkie te marzenia, obietnice: czekanie, a? b?d? mog?a znowu pisa?, a potem bolesny, sfuszerowany gwa?t na pierwszej kartce.

When I say I must write, I don't mean I must publish. There is a great difference. the important thing is the chaotic form given to my chaotic experience, which is, as it was for James Joyce, my kind of religion, and necessary for me...as the confession and absolution for a Catholic in church.

Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation.

Sure, marriage is self expression, but if only my art, my writing, isn't just a mere sublimation of my sexual desires which will run dry once I get married. If only I can find him ... the man who will be intelligent, yet physically magnetic and personable. If I can offer that combination, why shouldn't I expect it in a man?

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people. […] A feeling of tenderness filled my heart. My heroine would be myself, only in disguise.

The thing about writing is not to talk, but to do it; no matter how bad or even mediocre it is, the process and production is the thing, not the sitting and theorizing about how one should write ideally, or how well one could write if one really wanted to or had the time. As Mr. Kazin told me: 'You don't write to support yourself; you work to support your writing.

I would rather be a mediocre writer than a bad actress.

Também lembrei de Buddy Williard dizendo com uma voz sinistra e sabichona que depois que tivéssemos filhos eu me sentiria diferente e não mais teria vontade de escrever poemas. E me ocorreu que talvez fosse verdade aquela história de que casar e ter filhos era como passar por uma lavagem cerebral, e que depois eu que você ficava inerte feito um escravo num pequeno estado totalitário.