Because we have always written.
Because it’s the third thing, the god in the image, the ghost in the room, the thrall.
And because….. I have all these quotes written down in my notebooks… to share.
*
Seymour Krim: “I think all writing comes out of some sense of injustice: Why wasn’t I born beautiful? Why can’t I dance well? I think the inability to bear your situation as it’s been dealt to you has a very definite effect on your becoming a writer. It becomes changed and polished and you no longer have that primary feeling of changing your fate through your work—perhaps for some people, it always remains—but I think the impulse to rectify an injustice is at the bottom of the impulse to write.”
Dmitri Shostakovich: “We can’t allow the fear of death to creep up on us unexpectedly. We have to make the fear familiar, and one way is to write about it.”
Charles Simic: “The secret wish of poetry is to stop time….. Poems are other people’s snapshots in which we recognize ourselves.”
Claribel Alegria: “Traditionally in Central America the role of the poet is very important. In Central America, but especially in Nicaragua, practically everybody is a poet.”
Lucy Corin: “But what is more magic than access to death, what is more magic than something moving from a state of not being alive to being alive, or from being irrevocably lost to us to being present in another form, a form of sound and shadow, because of words, because of the sometimes inconceivable persistence of life? Every literary tradition I know is rooted in tales of the transformations between life and death. Words by their nature conjure; they make real. These are the stakes of magic in literature.”
Terry Tempest Williams: “When one woman doesn’t speak, other women get hurt.”
Adrienne Rich: “A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It's not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it's an instrument for embodied experience.”
Rita Dove: "I can’t imagine living without writing. Writing a poem for me means putting a name to a face, to memories. It means calling up emotions that I don’t quite have a handle on, and beginning to understand them a little better by writing about them. But it also means reaching out and connecting with someone else.”
Dumitriu Tsepeneag: "To have talent, I think, means to have the courage of pride and desperation, though also a little exhibitionism. The pride of thinking yourself a creator, Author; the desperation, because you know that no creation can be absolute, remaining, in fact, an apology, an exhibitionism, because you display the pride and desperation that accompany it." [trans. by Carla Baricz]
Julio Cortazar: “I was a very realistic child for the simple reason that the fantastic never seemed like the fantastic—but rather like one of many possibilities or existences that reality can present to us when, for some immediate or indirect reason, we manage to open ourselves up to the unexpected.”
Sven Bikerts: “When the words were coming, the future was naïvely projected as a continuation and fulfillment of the same. Working at full tilt one has a hard time imagining things ever not being thus. It is part of the nature of inspiration that it when it strikes us we feel it will be ongoing. In this one way, it’s like love. // Needless to say, writing is by now bound up with everything in my life, and there is no scenario, really, in which all other things are not affected by it. If I’m not writing, or at least pointed inwardly toward writing, I am suffering. Privately, I am listless and anxious by turns. Publicly I carry on as if I still had full title to my existence. But really, everything about how the day — the life — proceeds has to do with the presence or absence of the impulse.”
Natalie Goldberg: “The only place my walking into the room exists is in my saying it. I am keeping it alive. You turn around to look and me-walking-into-the-room is gone. You can’t see it.” ⁃ “There’s a dream dreaming us.”
Charles Simic: “Poetry is always the cat concert under the window of the room in which the official version of reality is being written.”
Donald Hall: “I write a lot of elegiac poetry. Poetry is trying to preserve place, and certainly elegiac poetry tries to keep the dead around. Poetry enacts our own losses so that we can share the notion that we all lose—and hold each other’s hands, as it were, in losing.”
Dorothy Allison: “The reality is that I am not to be trusted. Novelists are liars. That is a fact. We make up stories and try to tell them so well that people will fall under our spell and believe what we say absolutely. We work hard so that the reader will believe our fictional creations, believe all that stuff really happened--had to have happened. How, doing that, can we make so strong a claim to truth? More importantly, how, having written a novel that makes such terrible use of our own reality, can we claim a right to say what about our lives is now off-limits for public discussion?”
Graham Greene: “It is the storyteller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.”
Gerald Stern: “The poet’s main job might be to preserve memory.”
Anne Lauterbach: “Poetry protects language from serving any master. One can it better from the periphery than the center.”
Coleman Barks: “What is the ache within an ache? What do we really want when we love a river or a grandchild? What is something that doesn’t ever get solved in being human?”
George Saunders: “A short story works to remind us that if we are not sometimes baffled and amazed and undone by the world around us, rendered speechless and stunned, perhaps we are not paying close enough attention.”
Jane Hirschfield: “I grow lonely for poems, the way you would grow lonely for an absent lover. And then they return. Longing is the ladder we meet on.”
Grace Paley: “But during all those jobs, once I was married and after I had children, most of the day I was a housewife. That is the poorest paying job a woman can hold. But most women feel gypped by life if they don’t get a chance at it. And during all those jobs and all the time I was a housewife, I was a writer. The whole meaning of my life, which was jammed until midnight with fifteen different jobs and places, was writing. It took me a long time to know that, but I know it now.”
Carolyn Forche: “One of the things that I believe happens when poets bear witness to historical events is that everyone they tell becomes a witness too, everyone they tell also becomes responsible for what they have heard and what they now know.”
Claribel Alegria: “Where there is so much horror around you, I think you have to look at it. You have to feel it and suffer it with others and make that suffering yours.”
Garrett Kaoru Hongo: “I think poetry is about our most familiar need which we deny in order to lead more practical lives, but ultimately these lives are impractical because they do not have such presences in them. I think poetry can bring such presences back…”
Anne Carson: “In letters as in love, to imagine is to address oneself to what is not. To write words I put a symbol in place of an absent sound.”
Isabelle Allende: "I need to tell a story. It’s an obsession. Each story is a seed inside of me that starts to grow and grow, like a tumor, and I have to deal with it sooner or later. Why a particular story? I don’t know when I begin. That I learn much later. Over the years I’ve discovered that all the stories I’ve told, all the stories I will ever tell, are connected to me in some way. If I’m talking about a woman in Victorian times who leaves the safety of her home and comes to the Gold Rush in California, I’m really talking about feminism, about liberation, about the process I’ve gone through in my own life, escaping from a Chilean, Catholic, patriarchal, conservative, Victorian family and going out into the world."
Ray Bradbury: “You must write every single day of your life…You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads…May you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
Norman Manea: "What I do know, is that I refused to compromise with the system and I was obsessed with preventing my work from being manipulated for their propaganda. Even stories about the Holocaust could have been promoted as anti-fascist stories, which they were in a way, but I didn’t want them to be taken only as such. I remember I had a reading in Berlin in the ‘80s and a man in the audience, asked me: ‘Sir, I read your book, I read the stories, you didn’t say who the oppressors were nor who are the people who are suffering.’ And I said, ‘No, I didn’t.’ It was important to me that a Vietnamese reader reading a story about a young boy who is in a camp, can recognize himself, without me saying: the boy is a Jew, the oppressor is a Romanian, or a Nazi, and so on. I wanted to have a more universal approach."
Colette: "To write, to be able to write, what does it mean? It means spending long hours dreaming before a white page, scribbling unconsciously, letting your pen play around a blot of ink and nibble at a half-formed word, scratching it, making it bristle with darts, and adorning it with antennae and paws until it loses all resemblance to a legible word and turns into a fantastic insect or a fluttering creature half butterfly, half fairy."
Susan Sontag: "You have to be obsessed… [Being a writer] is not like something you want to be — it’s rather something you couldn’t help but be. But you have to be obsessed. Otherwise, of course, it’s perfectly okay to write, in the way that it’s perfectly okay to paint or play a musical instrument — and why shouldn’t people do that? I deplore the fact that only writers can write, as it were? Why can’t people have that as an art activity? … But to actually want to make your life being a writer, it’s an auto-slavery … you are both the slave and the task-master. It’s a very driven thing."
William Faulkner: “An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.”
Andrei Codrescu: “It is a sad fact that all flesh must die, but there is no reason why one's story, as well as one's soul, should be slighted after the passage. The attraction artists feel for our cemeteries is only partly aesthetic; much of it is gossip, a continual whisper intended for the delighted ear. Marble without a story is just marble. A true monument leans over and murmurs in your ear."
Ray Bradbury: (piping back in with a little advice on writing from lists) "Three things are in your head: First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth until right now. Every single second, every single hour, every single day. Then, how you reacted to those events in the minute of their happening, whether they were disastrous or joyful. Those are two things you have in your mind to give you material. Then, separate from the living experiences are all the art experiences you’ve had, the things you’ve learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So all of this is in your mind as a fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you do that? I did it by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean? You can go and make up your own list right now and it would be different than mine. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. All these things are very personal. Then, when you get the list down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? Do this and you’re on your way to being a good writer. You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are."
Petre Barbu: "Since we live here as emigrants...."
