The Solace of Writing

The solace of such work as I do with brain and heart lies in this - that only there, in the silences of the painter or the writer can reality be reordered, reworked and made to show its significant side. Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold - the meaning of the pattern. For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfill it in its true potential-the imagination. Otherwise why should we hurt one another? No, the remission I am seeking, and will be granted perhaps, is not one I shall ever see in the bright friendly eyes of Melissa or the sombre brow-dark gaze of Justine. We have all of us taken different paths now: but in this, the first great fragmentation of my maturity, I feel the confines of my art - and my living deepened immeasurably by the memory of them. In thought I achieve them anew; as if only here-this wooden table over the sea under an olive tree, only here can I enrich them as they deserve. So that the taste of this writing should have taken something from its living subjects-their breath, skin, voices - weaving them into the supple tissues of human memory. I want them to live again to the point where pain becomes art... Perhaps this is a useless attempt, I cannot say. But I must try.

Lawrence Durrell
Justine

Poems- William Carlos Williams

"It is difficult to get the news from poems,
but men die miserably everyday
for the lack of what is found there."

Tillie Olsen:Silences

The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken, even when circumstances now make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years-response to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters-stay with you, mark you, become you. The cost of "discontinuity" is such a weight of things unsaid, an accumulation of material so great, that evrything starts up something else inme; what should take weeks, takes me sometimes months to write; what should take monthe , takes years.

Orhan Pamuk : On Writing

" For me to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds we carry inside ourselves, wounds so secret that we are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, own them and make them a part of our spirit and our writing."

The Deep Part of the Well - Ernest Hemingway

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

Writing and the Reader - John Cheever

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss: you can't do it alone.

Saying Something

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

F. Scott Fitzgerald