Let Me Tell You What I Mean

“In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”

“Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

“Make a place available to the eyes, and in certain ways it is no longer available to the imagination.”

“This is the “woman’s pluck” story, the dust-bowl story, the burying-your-child-on-the-trail story, the I-will-never-go-hungry-again story, the Mildred Pierce story, the story about how the sheer nerve of even professionally unskilled women can prevail, show the men; the story that has historically encouraged women in this country, even as it has threatened men. The dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not of “feminine” domesticity but of female power, of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and, still in her apron, walks away with the chips. 2000”

“The peculiarity of being a writer is that the entire enterprise involves the mortal humiliation of seeing one's own words in print.”

“Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.”

“Superstition prevails, fear that the fragile unfinished something will shatter, vanish, revert to the nothing from which it was made.”

“The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded by happiness.”

“I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in Paradise Lost, the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote ten thousand words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco's dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait into a grayed and obscurely sinister light.”

“By which I mean not a "good" writer or a "bad" writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arrang- ing words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I'm think- ing, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

“I began to make notes. I began to write down everything I saw and heard and remembered and imagined. I began to write, or so I thought, another story.”

“What I actually had on my mind that year in New York - had on my mind as opposed to in my mind- was a longing for California, a homesickness, a nostalgia so obsessive that nothing else figured. In order to discover what was on my mind I needed room. I needed room for the rivers and for the rain and for the way almonds came into blossom around Sacramento, room for irrigation ditches and room for the fear of kiln fires, room in which to play with everything I remembered and did not understand.”

“In short I had no past, and, every Monday-Wednesday-Friday at noon in Dwinelle Hall, it seemed increasingly clear to me that I had no future.”

“I wonder if we had better not find some way to let our children know this, some way to extricate our expectations from theirs, some way to let them work through their own rejections and sullen rebellions and interludes with golf pros, unassisted by anxious prompting from the wings. Finding one's role at seventeen is problem enough, without being handed somebody else's script.”

“...it was at Vogue that I learned a kind of ease with words, a way of regarding words not as mirrors of my own inadequacy but as toys, tools and weapons to be deployed strategically on the page.”

“la historia de un hombre que regresa a un lugar que amó y se encuentra a las tres de la madrugada haciendo frente al conocimiento de que él ya no es la persona que amó ese lugar y ya no volverá a ser nunca la persona que había querido ser.”

“I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word "intellectual" I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts.”

“Of course I stole the title for this talk, from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this:IIIIn many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”

“I’m not interested in the middle road—maybe because everyone’s on it,” Didion said in a 1979 interview”

“We are all from somewhere. And it’s the artist’s job to question the values that went into the making of that somewhere.”

“Well, there it was. I got out fast then, before anyone could say "serenity" again, for it is a word I associate with death, and for several days after that meeting I wanted only to be in places where the lights were bright and no one counted days.”

“Mr. Schorer, a man of infinite kindness to and acuity about his students divined intuitively that my failing performance was a function of adolescent paralysis, of a yearning to be good and a fright that I would never be.”

“There were doomed virgins (downcast eyes, clasped hands), and imitations of mortality, skin like marble, faces like masques, a supernatural radiance, the phosphorescent glow we sometimes attribute to angels, and to decaying flesh.”

“«Trabajo cincuenta horas semanales y reconozco que a veces no tengo tiempo para «ser todo lo que puedo ser»,”

“Esta cuestión del sujeto es compleja. Da igual que sean pintores, fotógrafos, coreógrafos o incluso escritores, a las personas cuyo trabajo es convertir la nada en algo no les gusta mucho hablar de lo que hacen ni de cómo lo hacen. Están perfectamente dispuestos a hablar de los trucos técnicos que emplean en su actividad, de luces y filtros si son fotógrafos, de voz, tono y ritmo si son escritores, pero no del contenido. Todo intento de analizar el propio trabajo, que viene a ser lo mismo que conocer tu sujeto, se considera destructivo. La superstición se impone, el miedo a que algo frágil e inacabado se rompa, desaparezca, regrese a la nada a partir de la cual se creó. Jean Cocteau describió una vez ese trabajo como derivado de «una profunda indolencia, una somnolencia a la que nos abandonamos como si fuéramos inválidos que intentan prolongar los sueños». En sueños no analizamos la acción, si lo hacemos se esfuma.”

“La gramática es un piano que toco de oídas, porque al parecer el año en que explicaron las normas yo no fui a la escuela. Lo único que conozco de la gramática es su poder infinito. Cambiar la estructura de una frase altera el significado de esa frase de forma tan clara e inflexible como la posición de una cámara altera el significado del objeto fotografiado. Hoy en día mucha gente sabe de ángulos de cámara, pero no hay tanta que sepa de frases. La ordenación de las palabras importa, y la ordenación que buscas la puedes encontrar en la imagen de tu mente.”

“Dear Joan," the letter begins, although the writer did not know me at all.”

“The masters through their subjective perceptions created beauty out of trivialities. They did not hide their interest even in things which were nauseatingly ugly, but soaked themselves in the pleasure of depicting them. In other words, they seemed not to rely in the least on the misconceptions of others.”

“When my father was told that I had been rejected from Stanford, he shrugged and offered me a drink.”