
“Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.”
Source: My Reading Life
volume I, chapter II: "Autobiography", page 27 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=45&itemID=F1452.1&viewtype=image
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887)
“Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.”
Source: My Reading Life
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Context: It’s important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there’s a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there’s a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there’s a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance. The motive is paramount. Without a strong motive, you’re sunk. My motives were weak: an American-history paper I didn’t want to write and the question I’d asked months earlier, Why not kill myself? Dead, I wouldn’t have to write the paper. Nor would I have to keep debating the question.
On why he decided against writing proprietary software; quoted in Free as in Freedom : Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software' (2002) by Sam Williams http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/index.html
2000s
Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers, from This Bridge Called My Back
Letter sent to the ECLC after Dylan received the Tom Paine Award at the Bill of Rights dinner on December 13, 1963, as reported in "Mr. Dylan Regrets" http://www.hotpress.com/Bob-Dylan/music/interviews/Mr-Dylan-Regrets/2836632.html by Niall Stokes, Hot Press (11 November 2005)
“When I write I am attempting to do justice to something I have glimpsed about the world.”
Griffin Prize Questionnaire June 2012
Griffin Poetry Prize Questionnaire