
Variant: the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat
Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1950)
Variant: the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat
“The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself”
Liquidation (2003)
Context: But I believe in writing — nothing else; just writing. Man may live like a worm, but he writes like a god. There was a time when that secret was known, but now it has been forgotten; the world is composed of disintegrating fragments, an incoherent dark chaos, sustained by writing alone. If you have a concept of the world, if you have not yet forgotten all that has happened, that you have a world at all, it is writing that has created that for you, and ceaselessly goes on creating it; Logos, the invisible spider’s thread that holds our lives together.
“Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.”
The Ascent of Humanity http://charleseisenstein.net/project/ascent-of-humanity/
The Ascent of Humanity (2007)
" My Father's Suitcase", Nobel Prize for Literature lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2006/pamuk-lecture_en.html (December 7, 2006).
Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers, from This Bridge Called My Back