Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Let's face it, writing is hell.
Writing is a form of self-flagellation.
The writer's duty is to keep on writing.
Let your love flow out on all living things.
Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive.
A great book should leave you with many experiences.
I think it's unfortunate to have critics for friends.
And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.
Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.
we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.
It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
The weather of Depression is unmodulated, its light a brownout.
Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.
This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.
If we do not find anything very pleasant, at least we shall find something new.
The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
I felt the exultancy of a man just released from slavery and ready to set the universe on fire.
In the absence of hope we must still struggle to survive, and so we do-by the skin of our teeth.
I think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation between good and evil.
The stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.
Writing is a fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats... for jittery people.
Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word - life.
For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.
Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what a friend of mine calls
Which is worse, past or future? Neither. I will fold up my mind like a leaf and drift on this stream over the brink.
The pain is unrelenting; one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time — for jittery people.
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can't quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.
My life and work have been far from free of blemish, and so I think it would be unpardonable for a biographer not to dish up the dirt.
When, in the autumn of 1947, I was fired from the first and only job I have ever held, I wanted one thing out of life: to become a writer.
I have learned to cry again and I think perhaps that means I am a human being again. Perhaps that at least. A piece of human being but, yes, a human being.
What I really mean is that a great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell.
Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.
Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
In Vineyard Haven, on Martha's Vineyard, mostly I love the soft collision here of harbor and shore, the subtly haunting briny quality that all small towns have when they are situated on the sea
In Paris on a chilling evening late in October of 1985 I first became fully aware that the struggle with the disorder in my mind - a struggle which had engaged me for several months - might have a fatal outcome.
I'm simply the happiest, the placidest, when I'm writing, and so I suppose that that, for me, is the final answer. ... It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time.
my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.
I felt myself no longer a husk but a body with some of the body's sweet juices stirring again. I had my first dream in many months, confused but to this day imperishable, with a flute in it somewhere, and a wild goose, and a dancing girl.
I felt a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility - as if my body had actually become frail, hypersensitive and somehow disjointed and clumsy, lacking normal coordination. And soon I was in the throes of a pervasive hypochondria.
The mornings themselves were becoming bad now as I wandered about lethargic, following my synthetic sleep, but afternoons were still the worst, beginning at about three o'clock, when I'd feel the horror, like some poisonous fog bank roll in upon my mind, forcing me into bed.
The pain of depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain.
The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero. Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained.