May Sarton Quotes About Writing
-
have the courage to write whatever your dream is for yourself.
→ -
My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.
→ -
I am furious at all the letters to answer, when all I want to do is think and write poems. ... I long for open time, with no obligations except toward the inner world and what is going on there.
→ -
I live alone, perhaps for no good reason, for the reason that I am an impossible creature, set apart by a temperament I have never learned to use as it could be used, thrown off by a word, a glance, a rainy day, or one drink too many. My need to be alone is balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge empty silence if I cannot find support there. I go up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour, and keep alive only by imposing upon myself inexorable routines. I write too many letters and too few poems.
→ -
I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.
→ -
I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.
→ -
...I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except when I'm making love. Two things when you forget time, when nothing exists except the moment--the moment of writing, the moment of love. That perfect concentration is bliss.
→ -
I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.
→ -
If one is the kind of creature I am and wants to do the kind of writing I want to do, an undisturbed bourgeois existence with no distractions seems in order. A single meeting outside the family upsets one's whole inner web, makes one start off on two-days' thinking and weighing, destroys a delicate balance etc. etc. ... I now have enough friends to last me a lifetime and that is enough. I am going to close the doors and hibernate at least for a couple of years. I am frightfully depressed about my work. It seems to me perfectly mediocre.
→ -
I’m only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me.
→ -
poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.
→ -
I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.
→ -
We have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe, or work can-if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough-be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being.
→ -
Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
→ -
I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.
→ -
It is dangerous it seems to me for a civilization when there is a complete abyss betewen people in general and the artists. Or is it always so? The poets who are most ardently on the people's side write in such a way that the people cannot see rhyme nor reason to their work.
→ -
When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.
→ -
And I refuse to feel guilty about not letter-writing either. There are times when one can, times when one can't. In the times when an enormous amount of living is going on, one can't.
→
Related Authors
-
Stanley Kunitz Poet -
Virginia Woolf Writer -
Richard Eberhart Poet -
Rainer Maria Rilke Poet -
Robert Browning Poet -
Philip Larkin Poet -
Carolyn Heilbrun Author -
Sarah Orne Jewett Novelist -
George Sarton Historian of Science -
Stephen Spender Poet -
Janet Frame Author -
Elizabeth Bowen Novelist -
Louise Bogan Poet -
Vita Sackville-West Author -
Muriel Rukeyser Poet -
Doris Grumbach Novelist -
Henry David Thoreau Author -
Garrison Keillor Author -
May Swenson Poet -
Annie Dillard Author