Quotes by category:Writing

We also write to heighten our own awareness of life... We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection... We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it...to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely... When I don't write, I feel my world shrinking... I feel I lose my fire and my color.

lonely journey writing

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

writing culture commitment

I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which o... by Anais Nin

I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.

writing believe world

We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection... by Anais Nin

We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection.

heart writing love

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of... by Anais Nin

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.

writing life ideas

The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned.

journey writing book

Writing more and more to the sound of music, writing more and more like music. Sitting in my studio tonight, playing record after record, writing, music a stimulant of the highest order, far more potent than wine.

music wine writing

Write. Write until it stops hurting. by Anais Nin

Write. Write until it stops hurting.

It amazes me that you feel that each time you write a story you give away one of your dreams and you feel the poorer for it. But then you have not thought that this dream is planted in others, others begin to live it too, it is shared, it is the beginning of friendship and love. How is this world made which you enjoy, the friends around me that you love? They came because I first gave away my stories.

dream writing giving

I am a failure as a writer. The publishers won't publish me, the bookshops won't carry my books, the critics won't write about me. I am excluded from all anthologies, and completely ignored.

ignored writing book

I needed to live, but I also needed to record what I lived. by Anais Nin

I needed to live, but I also needed to record what I lived.

records needed writing

When I don't write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.

color fire writing

The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness.

eye responsibility writing

I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only... by Anais Nin

I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.

prison writing beautiful

Our age has need of violence," he writes. And he is violence. by Anais Nin

Our age has need of violence," he writes. And he is violence.

age writing needs

I write emotional algebra. by Anais Nin

I write emotional algebra.

algebra emotional writing

Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing.

vitality essentials writing

I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.

focus writing beautiful

Three or four threads may be agitated, like telegraph wires, at the same time, and if I were to tap them all I would reveal such a mixture of innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and courage, I cannot tell the whole truth simply because I would have to write four journals at once.

duplicity generosity writing

Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.

reactions writing two