All Quotes By Tag: Writing

“It might be said of Miss [Djuna] Barnes,” [T.S. Eliot] wrote, “who is incontestably one of the most original writers of our time, that never has so much genius been combined with so little talent.”

“If the mystery can be reduced to one solution, it lies in a simple coincidence: Rimbaud’s interest in his own work had survived the realization that the world would not be changed by verbal innovation. It did not survive the failure of all his adult relationships. He had always treated poems as a form of private communication. He gave his songs to chansonniers, his satires to satirists. Without a constant companion, he was writing in a void.”

“I remember a man, a very lonely man, coming up to me at the end of a reading and looking into my face and saying, ‘I feel as if I have looked down a corridor and seen into your soul.’ And I looked at him and said, ‘You haven’t.’ You know, Here’s the good news and the bad news: you haven’t! I made something, and you and I could look at it together, but it’s not me; you don’t live with me; you’re not intimate with me. You’re not the man I live with or my friend. You will never know me in that way. I’m making something, like Joseph Cornell makes his boxes and everyone looks into them, but it’s the box you look into; it’s not the man or the woman. It’s alchemy of language and memory and imagination and time and music and sounds that gets made, and that’s different from ‘Here is what happened to me when I was ten.”

“I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.”

“…there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer’s own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.”

“A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness. And by doing so he draws the reader’s eye from its usual groove into a new way of seeing things.”

“I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time.”

“The greatest writers have persistence.”

“If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has. ”

“How dare I presume to say: He is my friend, or even, more cautiously, I think I know him? At the very most we are like two strangers meeting in the white wintry veld and sitting down together for a while to smoke a pipe before proceeding on their separate ways. No more.Alone. Alone to the very end. I… every one of us. But to have been granted the grace of meeting and touching so fleetingly: is that not the most awesome and wonderful thing one can hope for in this world?”

“It is not my words that I polish, but my ideas. 102”

“The world doesn’t fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.”

“I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.”

“Where do you think my new novel is? In the waste basket. I can see myself that it’s no good on earth, and when a loving author realizes this, what would be the judgment of a critical public?”

“Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness… proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures.”