Quotes About Introspection

Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

I had never before understood what "despair" meant, and I am not sure that I understand now, but I understood that year.

I write to know what I think.

To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening.

It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about.

The peculiarity of being a writer is that the entire enterprise involves the mortal humiliation of seeing one's own words in print.

I mean maybe I was holding all of the aces, but what was the game?

You see the point. I want to tell you the truth, and already I have told you about the wide rivers.

I remember thinking that I needed to discuss this with John.

I don't know what I think until I write about it.

Yet I was myself in no way prepared to accept this news as final: there was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible. That was why I needed to be alone. After

There could be no snake in Quntana Roo's garden. Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.

So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.

It had seemed this past month as if they were all one, that her life had been a single sexual encounter, one dreamed fuck, no beginnings or endings, no point beyond itself.

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

I dealt with it the same way I deal with everything. I just tended my own garden, didn't pay much attention, behaved—I suppose—deviously. I mean I didn't actually let too many people know what I was doing.

Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.

It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young?

Just so. I am what I am. To look for "reasons" is beside the point.

I think I have never known anyone who led quite unexamined a life.

This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.

This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning.

De ce trebuie s? ai mereu dreptate, îmi spunea el. N-a înÈ›eles vreodat? c? în mintea mea n-aveam niciodat? dreptate.