Quotes About Writing

Each of these magic seven weeks: writing: not the novel yet, until I'm warmed up.

I love my rejections. They prove that I'm trying'. I'm convinced this quote from Sylvia Plath is one of the best incentives to keep a struggling writer from giving up.

Why am I obsessed with the idea I can justify myself by getting manuscripts published? Is it an escape-an excuse for any social failure-so I can say No, I don't go out for many extracurricular activities, but I spend a lot of time writing. Or is it an excuse for wanting to be alone and meditate alone, not having to brave a group of women? (Women in numbers has always disturbed me.)

La furia blocca l'esofago e sparge veleno, ma appena mi metto a scrivere svanisce, scorre via sotto forma di caratteri: scrittura come terapia?

digestible enough to be written out in short stories and poems, when I had a certain slickness that is enviable now

To know a lot of people I love pieces of, and to want to synthesize those pieces in me somehow, be it by painting or writing.

My health is making stories, poems, novels, of experience: that is why, or, rather, that is why it is good, that I have suffered & been to hell, although not to all the hells. I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux.

Perchè mi sento libera di scriverle [le parole]? La mia identità prende forma, si modella - sento che i racconti fioriscono mentre leggo la raccolta del New Yorker - sì, quanto i tempi saranno maturi, io sarò tra loro - le poetesse, le autrici.

Every day, writing. No matter how bad. Something will come. I have been spoiled to think it will come too soon: without work & sweat. Well, now for 40 days I work & sweat.

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt....

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.

got depressed with the ending on Tuesday: four pages of anti-climactic question and answer between Doctor and Sara, dry and chopped logical as an adding machine: now, you've decided this, how do you feel about that. Bad as a rich involved poem with a bare flat two-line moral tacked on the end: this is the truth kiddies

See each scene deep, love it like a complex faceted jewel. Get the light, shadow & vivid color. Set scene the night before. Sleep on it, write it in the morning.

whole emphasis has swung again, to a realization that if I enter this academic, critical world, I'll spend all my time reading and reading, and that I need a healthy overturning of the apple-cart, almost a refusal to read beyond a point, and to read more of what influences my writing, rather

New Yorker rejection of poems may smack me in the stomach any morning.

Began another big one, more abstract, written from the bathtub:

I would spend my whole time writing on some obscure theme in the works of James Joyce.

Las letras surgen de estas teclas negras, y estas teclas negras Surgen de mis dedos alfabéticos, ordenando partes, Partes, pedazos, piezas, múltiplos brillantes. Aquí, cada vez que me siento, muero. Pierdo una dimensión.

For me," she wrote, "poetry is an evasion from the real job of writing prose." Throughout

write every story, not to publish, but to be a better writer, and ipso facto, closer to publishing. Also: don't panic.

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing, which remark I guess shows I still don't have pure motives (oh-it's-such-fun-I-just-can't-stop-who-cares-if-it's-published-or-read) about writing. It is more fun to me, than it was when I used it solely as a love-and-admiration-getting mechanism [...]. But I still want to see it finally ritualized in print.

Every writer owes something to Holmes. -- T.S. Eliot, in The Criterion, 1929

The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.

What profession is more trying than that of author? After you finish a piece of work it only seems good to you for a few weeks; or if it seems good at all you are convinced that it is the last you will be able to write; and if it seems bad you wonder whether everything you have done isn't poor stuff really; and it is one kind of agony while you are writing, and another kind when you aren't.