tiny collection of good snippets.
Heather Havrilesky, Ask Polly
“People who write books have a lot in common. They’re people who are willing to work very, very hard in isolation in order to feed the notion that they’re special and soon the world will recognize it. They’re also people who feel like failures when they start a book but don’t finish it, finish it but don’t publish it, publish it but it’s not publicized, it’s publicized but it doesn’t sell, it sells but it’s not optioned, it’s optioned but it doesn’t win awards, it wins awards but no one on social media seems to know / remember / care.
But that’s not all. People who write books live in their own heads and construct their own private reality there. They escaped into books as children and they’re still escaping. They formulate narratives that make them feel loved and safe, but they also inadvertently write narratives that make them feel doomed.
And crucially, people who write books are people who believe that other people don’t get them — never have, never will. Because why would any human spend hours, weeks, months, and years writing in isolation, without an audience, without encouragement, if they weren’t obsessed with fixing this problem and being understood, adored, praised, celebrated, and LOVED FOR EXACTLY WHO THEY ARE, AT LONG LAST?
Writing is a quest for love. It’s compulsive. It’s a form of self-soothing and also a form of self-punishment. It’s an escape and also an attempt to face reality. It’s a way of broadcasting “I’m still here!” and also a way of hiding from everyone, among words that will give you love when no one else will.”
George Orwell, “Why I Write”
“I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject-matter will be determined by the age he lives in – at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own – but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, or in some perverse mood: but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write.”
“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.”
“Still, when one reads a hyperproductive writer one can be sure one is in the presence of some kind of voluptuary. Most writers don’t actually like the act of writing, finding it tiring, depressing, or, most often, disappointing. For a few, writing is less labor than it is an exhilarating drug that can’t be taken too often. The football coach John Madden said once that being good at blocking in football is mostly just liking to block, meaning that the bruising and the pain of it has to become a pleasure. Writing that much and that steadily is, similarly, mostly just liking to do it. Though Simenon claimed, unconvincingly, that he had difficulty in writing, in the next breath he admitted how much he loved all the appurtenances of writing: notebooks and pencils and papers, the thrill of the blank page, the feeling of being complacently superior to the rest of creation, wiser and more serene, when you begin. For such happy, addicted writers, fertility is less a function of energy than of dissipation: they’re doing what feels best.”
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
“We may know the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life.”