WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.
There is my desert.
WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.
There is my desert.
THE WRITER can get free of his writing only by using it, that is, by reading oneself. As if the aim of writing were to use what is already written as a launching pad for reading the writing to come.
Moreover, what he has written is read in the process, hence constantly modified by his reading.
The book is an unbearable totality.
I write against a background of facets.
It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to loses it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak.
I don't write - I'm too aware of the difference between writing for the sake of it and having something to say.
Real life isn't required to be logical, but fiction has to make sense.
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 always figured that every word that managed to squeeze itself from my pen had to be immortal. Turns out they're all disposable. What a relief.
She could write the scene three times over, from three points of view...none of these three was bad, nor were they particularly good. She need not judge...She need only show seperate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show that they had equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.
My tongue is prone to lose the way,
Not so my pen, for in a letter
We have not better things to say,
But surely put them better.
I have always been more afraid of a pen, a bottle of ink and a sheet of paper than of a sword or a pistol.
Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
"Words never mean what we want them to mean"
To stay close and intimate with experience is to stay close to the mind; the nitty gritty mind of the way things really are.
As writers we need to crack open language.
Your detailed plan of action means very little - it will change over time. Yet, writing out your detailed plan of action means everything - especially if it seems impossible.
I believe one writes because on has to create a world in which one can live.
A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.
I think a real writer simply has to think in other terms. Not, "Will I get in this magazine? Will I get the NEA next year?" but whether or not this work is something he would do if a gun was held to his head and somebody was going to pull the trigger as soon as the last word of the last paragraph of the last page was finished. Now if you can write out of the sense that you're going to die as soon as the work is done, then you will write with urgency, honesty, courage, and without flinching at all, as if this were the last testament in language, the last utterance you could ever make to anybody. If a work is written like that, then I want to read it. If somebody's writing out of that sense, then I'll say, "This is serious. This person is not fooling around. This work is not a means to some other end, the work is not just intended for some silly superficial goal, this work is the writer saying something, because he or she feels that if it isn't said, it will never be said." Those are the writers I want to read. And there are not many twentieth-century writers like that [nor twenty-first century writers either!--SMdM].
I sometimes hold it half a sin, To put in words the grief I feel. For words, like nature, half reveal, And half conceal the soul within.
I didn’t look back. I couldn’t. Such is life, imaginary or otherwise: a continuous parting of ways, a constant flux of approximation and distanciation, lines of fate intersecting at a point which is no-time, a theoretical crossroads fictitiously “present,” an unstable ice floe forever drifting between was and will be. The Adventure called and I followed with my thumb like a character being written by an intractable author. Which, of course, I was.
A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow.
Poetry is Truth, but not necessarily reality.
I've been aware of death since I was a little girl. My only regret will be not being able to write about it.
Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heart-ache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because se we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he gets desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive form the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up to discover what is already there.
If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.
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I’m arguably the least real of all my characters, a state of affairs for which I make no apologies, being, indeed, altogether proud of the fact. I am, as it were, the created creating--a paradox, for all its rhetorical trappings, at the beating heart of our shared human journey, and one I invite you to struggle with just as I have while, day in and day out, word by word and line by line, constructing a fictitious autobiography for myself in these pages.
Once in every generation, if we’re lucky, a character shows up who can teach us about reality because he’s more real than ourselves. Melville called such a character a “Drummond light” after the type of light once used in theaters that was capable of providing illumination in many directions. May one of us create such a character. Better yet, let’s buck tradition and create a string of Drummond lights, each a brilliant facet of the Hope Diamond that is our new fiction. Let’s turn away, once and for all, from old Enlightenment tropes toward a new narrative of Enwritenment. Together let’s write light.
