Writing

"Creativity and intelligence, rather than violence, are the best problem solvers."

"I write what I love. I will not stop – even when my hand hurts….…. because I cannot stop – even though my heart hurts…."

"Our body is a sacred temple A place to connect with people. As we aren't staying any younger We might as well keep it stronger."

"Pain writes the words, sorrow wields the pen, tears wet the paper, and the story mends the heart."

"I swear that girl was born with a pen in her hand, the moon in her hair and stars in her soul."

"A really cultured woman, like a really cultured man, is all the simpler and the less obtrusive for her knowledge; it has made her see herself and her opinions in something like just proportions; she does not make it a pedestal from which she flatters herself that she commands a complete view of men and things, but makes it a point of observation from which to form a right estimate of herself. She neither spouts poetry nor quotes Cicero on slight provocation; not because she thinks that a sacrifice must be made to the prejudices of men, but because that mode of exhibiting her memory and Latinity does not present itself to her as edifying or graceful"

"If you have a dream, keep it. But write it down and take appropriate actions to see it manifest."

"Some things are just like riding a bicycle; you jump on, pedal, and hope you don’t fall."

"Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before."

"Writers Are Insane. For months we are lone wolves locked in our caves. Then overnight we become publicity hounds. It's a schizophrenic business."

"I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death."

"I am beginning to be sorry that I ever undertook to write this book. Not that it bores me; I have nothing else to do; indeed, it is a welcome distraction from eternity. But the book is tedious, it smells of the tomb, it has a rigor mortis about it; a serious fault, and yet a relatively small one, for the great defect of this book is you, reader. You want to live fast, to get to the end, and the book ambles along slowly; you like straight, solid narrative and a smooth style, but this book and my style are like a pair of drunks; they stagger to the right and to the left, they start and they stop, they mutter, they roar, they guffaw, they threaten the sky, they slip and fall... And fall! Unhappy leaves of my cypress tree, you had to fall, like everything else that is lovely and beautiful; if I had eyes, I would shed a tear of remembrance for you. And this is the great advantage in being dead, that if you have no mouth with which to laugh, neither have you eyes with which to cry."

"...and yet the idea is hard to accept, it's so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what's been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough to manage it, if our own will is made in its semblance. It may be, rather, that nothing is ever unmixed and the thirst for totality is never quenched, perhaps because it is a false yearning. Nothing is whole or of a single piece, everything is fractured and evenomed, veins of peace run through the body of war and hatred insinuates itself into love and compassion, there is truce amid the quagmire of bullets and a bullet amid the revelries, nothing can bear to be unique or prevail or be dominant and everything needs fissures and cracks, needs it negation at the same time as its existence. And nothing is known with certainty and everything is told figuratively."

"When I die I hope it may be said:'Her suffering was black, but her books were read'."

"I believe that to be the world's greatest livingwriterthere must be somethingterribly wrong with you. I don't even want to be the world's greatestdead writer.just being dead would be fairenough."

"Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about."

"I grew up in a hospital and as a child I played in the dissecting room"

"I recognized my work for what it was--as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes, or cheap jewellry?"

"At the evident risk of seeming ridiculous, I want to begin by saying that I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously. I hope this isn't too melodramatic or self-centred a way of saying that I attempt to write as if I did not care what reviewers said, what peers thought, or what prevailing opinions may be."

"Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose."