“I only want to write. And there's no college for that except life.”
Dodie Smith book I Capture the Castle
Source: I Capture the Castle
“[N]othing is as surprising as life. Except for writing. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for writing, the only consolation.”
— Orhan Pamuk, book The Black Book
Source: The Black Book
Last update Oct. 2, 2023. History
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Orhan Pamuk55
Turkish novelist, screenwriter, and Nobel Prize in Literatu… 1952Related quotes
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“…. We write our lives indeed, But in a cipher none can read, Except the author”
Frances Ridley Havergal (1836–1879) British poet and hymn-writer
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“I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative”
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer
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.
Bernard Malamud (1914–1986) American author
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.
Joyce Kilmer (1886–1918) American poet, editor, literary critic, soldier
A letter home, included in Joyce Kilmer, Poems, Essays and Letters (1918) edited by Robert Holliday