Denise Levertov (October 24, 1923 - December 20, 1997) Strength of feeling, reverence for mystery, and clarity of intellect must be kept in balance with one another. Neither the passive nor the active must dominate, they must work in conjunction, as in a marriage.
Charles Bukowski On Creativity And Writing
Charles Bukowski (August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) Somebody [...] asked me: 'What do you do? How do you write, create?' You don't, I told them. You don't try. That's very important: 'not' to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a …
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Alice Koller On Writing
Alice Koller The only “doing” that’s the same every day is that most writers go to the same desk and chair that we sat in and worked at yesterday, and that the “working” is with the same computer, and the same pen, or the same kind of pen, each with a different color of ink. …
Nell Freudenberger On Writing
Nell Freudenberger I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn’t have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private — a comforting thought. If you can make that distinction in your head, you can write just the way you always did, …
Elizabeth Bowen On Writing
Elizabeth Bowen (7 June 1899 – 22 February 1973) I am sure that in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt. It's a sign, I suppose, of life's decreasing livableness as life that people should feel it possible to make themselves felt in so few …
Jamaica Kincaid On Writing
Jamaica Kincaid (May 25, 1949 -) When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself. And while I'm doing it, I really have the feeling that this time, at the end of it, I will be other than myself. Of course, every time …
Michael Chabon On Writing
Michael Chabon (May 24, 1963 -) I think that if I learned anything, it's that you can feel completely despairing and hopeless and in over your head and lost and incompetent in the course of writing a book, but that doesn't mean all those things are true. You can fight your way through those periods …
