“If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire is not to write”
Source: Notes to Myself
On writing as a woman in “INTERVIEW WITH ARIANA REINES” http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-ariana-reines/ in The White Review (July 2019)
“If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire is not to write”
Source: Notes to Myself
Get Writing (2004), as quoted in Modern Women Poets (2005) by Deryn Rees-Jones, p. 392
Context: Poems, like dreams, have a visible subject and an invisible one. The invisible one is the one you can't choose, the one that writes itself. Not a message that comes at the end of the poem, more like a pathological condition that deforms every word – a resonance, a manner of speaking, a nervous tic, a pressure. And this invisible subject only shows up when you're speaking the language that you speak when no one is there to correct or applaud you. Remembering that language is the whole skill of writing well.
Source: The Cabinet Council (published 1658), Chapter 25
The Syntax of Sorcery (2012)
Context: Certain individual words do possess more pitch, more radiance, more shazam! than others, but it's the way words are juxtaposed with other words in a phrase or sentence that can create magic. Perhaps literally. The word "grammar," like its sister word "glamour," is actually derived from an old Scottish word that meant "sorcery." When we were made to diagram sentences in high school, we were unwittingly being instructed in syntax sorcery, in wizardry. We were all enrolled at Hogwarts. Who knew?
When a culture is being dumbed down as effectively as ours is, its narrative arts (literature, film, theatre) seem to vacillate between the brutal and the bland, sometimes in the same work. The pervasive brutality in current fiction – the death, disease, dysfunction, depression, dismemberment, drug addiction, dementia, and dreary little dramas of domestic discord – is an obvious example of how language in exploitative, cynical or simply neurotic hands can add to the weariness, the darkness in the world. Less apparent is that bland writing — timid, antiseptic, vanilla writing – is nearly as unhealthy as the brutal and dark. Instead of sipping, say, elixir, nectar, tequila, or champagne, the reader is invited to slurp lumpy milk or choke on the author's dust bunnies.
“Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.”
“When I read, it is not acted literature; but what I write is written acting.”
Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)
“The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.”
A Map of the World (1982), cited from Carol Homden, The Plays of David Hare (1995), p. 124.
“What is writing? Writing is telepathy.”
Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft