Quotes by Writing A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls. Aleksandar Hemon wallspacewriting Sometimes I don't write at all. Someone once asked me, "What do you do when you're not writing?" And I said, "I idle." Aleksandar Hemon saidwritingsometimes There's no bad writing; you did something. I was operating inside language, and I did something. I'm not ashamed of it. Aleksandar Hemon bad-writinglanguagewriting The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction. Aleksandar Hemon literaturewritingfiction I hate traveling and being away from my family. But I like meeting my readers, as what I write is actualized in them. Those encounters are exhilarating to me. Aleksandar Hemon encountershatewriting No reader owes me anything - I am owed nothing for my noble efforts, because my writing was always unconditional, always coming out of inner necessity. Aleksandar Hemon effortnoblewriting For a fight to be productive, or at least relevant, writers should fight over different demands they put upon writing (as an individual, private act) and literature (a network of relations in which we are all involved). Aleksandar Hemon differentfightingwriting Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write. Aleksandar Hemon saidwritingart I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise. Aleksandar Hemon assumptionliteraturewriting I want a book to contain a world - indeed the world. Writing is my main means of engagement with the world and I want the scars of that engagement to be left in the language. Aleksandar Hemon writingmeanbook To write has to be related to a drive inside. Aleksandar Hemon relatedwriting I'm not nervous if I think about something for nine years and then I don't write it. Even if it fades it doesn't concern me. It'll come back if it's worth it. Aleksandar Hemon writingyearsthinking There are many things I think about that never get to the point of becoming serious. In other words, I try to talk myself out of writing, sometimes for many years, and when I run out of arguments, I write. Aleksandar Hemon writingrunningthinking I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game. I think that you ought not to approach literature without a moral responsibility for every word you write. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn responsibilitywritingthinking In our age, when technology is gaining control over life, when material well-being is considered the most important goal, when the influence of religion has been weakened everywhere in the world, a special responsibility lies upon the writer. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn responsibilitywritinglying When I was in the gulag I would sometimes even write on stone walls. I used to write on scraps of paper, then I memorised the contents and destroyed the scraps. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wallpaperwriting The secret is that when you've been pitched head first into hell you just write about it Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn secretwritingfirsts In the camp, this meant committing my verse-many thousands of lines-to memory. To help me with this I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentences I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prose-dialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages. My memory found room for them! It worked. But more and more of my time-in the end as much as one week every month-went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lineswritingmemories One of the less vaunted joys of Austen is that she is one of the greatest writers in the English language who also happened to write witty romance novels. Women enjoy the love stories in Austen the same way men read Hemingway for the hunting and fishing: it provides guiltless pleasure. Alessandra Stanley writingwittymen When Shonda Rhimes writes her autobiography, it should be called How to Get Away With Being an Angry Black Woman. Alessandra Stanley blackshouldwriting«2728293031323334353637»
