The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5, as quoted in Moving to Antarctica : An Anthology of Women's Writing (1975) by Margaret Kaminski
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Context: 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.
“All that writers can do is keep trying to say what is deepest in their hearts.”
“The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.”
As quoted in Conde Nast Sibling Reddit Says Banning Hate Speech Is Just Too Hard https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/reddit-ceo-ban-hate-speech-hard_us_5b437fa9e4b07aea75429355 (9 July 2018) by Ashley Feinberg, HuffPost.
Entry in his journal before his last public appearance, the ceremony at which he received the National Medal for Literature, quoted by Susan Cheever, Home before Dark Houghton Mifflin (1984).
“A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.”
Nobel Prize Speech (1954)
asked why he "almost threw up" at John F. Kennedy's speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association
2012-02-26
This Week with George Stephanopoulos
ABC
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/week-transcript-rick-santorum/story?id=15785514&page=5
“It is up to the Iranian people to say what role I should play.”
As quoted in Cnaan Liphshiz. Obama ‘chickened out’ of confronting mullahs http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=272989. The Jerusalem Post. July 6, 2012.
Interviews, 2012
“A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.”
“A painter can leave you with nothing left to say. A writer leaves you with everything to say.”
'Georg Christoph Lichtenberg', p. 405
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
