“[N]othing is as surprising as life. Except for writing. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for writing, the only consolation.”
Source: The Black Book
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Orhan Pamuk 55
Turkish novelist, screenwriter, and Nobel Prize in Literatu… 1952Related quotes

“[N]othing is worthwhile on this unhappy earth except the fulfilment of a man's desire.”
Source: The Four Men: A Farrago (1911), p. 4

“What can man know about happiness except how to write it?”
Statek (1994)

“nothing can save
you
except
writing.
it keeps the walls
from
failing.”

“…. We write our lives indeed, But in a cipher none can read, Except the author”
Autobiography (poem by Frances Havergal).

“I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative”
August 16, 1773
The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785)
Context: I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made.

Address at Bennington College (30 October 1984) as published in "Reflections of a Writer: Long Work, Short Life" in The New York Times (20 March 1988)
Context: I have written almost all my life. My writing has drawn, out of a reluctant soul, a measure of astonishment at the nature of life. And the more I wrote well, the better I felt I had to write.
In writing I had to say what had happened to me, yet present it as though it had been magically revealed. I began to write seriously when I had taught myself the discipline necessary to achieve what I wanted. When I touched that time, my words announced themselves to me. I have given my life to writing without regret, except when I consider what in my work I might have done better. I wanted my writing to be as good as it must be, and on the whole I think it is. I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times — once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.
Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one's fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing: The men and things of today are wont to lie fairer and truer in tomorrow's meadow, Henry Thoreau said.
I don't regret the years I put into my work. Perhaps I regret the fact that I was not two men, one who could live a full life apart from writing; and one who lived in art, exploring all he had to experience and know how to make his work right; yet not regretting that he had put his life into the art of perfecting the work.

A letter home, included in Joyce Kilmer, Poems, Essays and Letters (1918) edited by Robert Holliday