“If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.”
Source: Mud, Sweat, and Tears: The Autobiography
“Not to belong anywhere, to be displaced, is not a bad thing for a writer…If you can deal with it. If it doesn’t destroy you.”
On not feeling that a place is truly home in “Ariel Dorfman: 'Not to belong anywhere, to be displaced, is not a bad thing for a writer'” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/09/ariel-dorfman-not-to-belong-anywhere-to-be-displaced-is-not-a-bad-thing-for-a-writer in The Guardian (2018 May 9)
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Chilean writer 1942Related quotes
Ted Hughes
(1930–1998) English poet and children's writer
The Paris Review interview
Context: Many writers write a great deal, but very few write more than a very little of the real thing. So most writing must be displaced activity. When cockerels confront each other and daren’t fight, they busily start pecking imaginary grains off to the side. That’s displaced activity. Much of what we do at any level is a bit like that, I fancy. But hard to know which is which. On the other hand, the machinery has to be kept running. The big problem for those who write verse is keeping the machine running without simply exercising evasion of the real confrontation. If Ulanova, the ballerina, missed one day of practice, she couldn’t get back to peak fitness without a week of hard work. Dickens said the same about his writing—if he missed a day he needed a week of hard slog to get back into the flow.
“I can tell you that only a fool destroys useful things merely because he doesn’t like them.”
Source: Masters of the Maze (1965), Chapter 8 (p. 108)
“What's the point of living if you don't belong anywhere?”
Julie Anne Peters
(1952) American writer
Source: By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead
Source: The City of Dreaming Books
Isabel Allende
(1942) Chilean writer
On how her sense of self remains tied to her native country in “Isabel Allende: 'Few couples survive the death of one child, let alone three'” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/02/isabel-allende-interview-marriage-breakup-the-japanese-lover in The Guardian (2015 Dec 2)
“It is a poor thing for the writer to take on that which he doesn’t understand.”
Anton Chekhov
(1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician
Letter to A.S. Suvorin (October 27, 1888)
Letters
“There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.”
Amy Bloom
(1953) Fiction writer, screenwriter, social worker, psychotherapist
Source: A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You