Writing
Marguerite Duras
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome.”
“The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.”
“Writing was the only thing that populated my life and made it magic.”
“Women should not let lovers read the books they write.”
“One does not find solitude, one creates it. Solitude is created alone. I have created it. Because I decided that here was where I should be alone, that I would be alone to write books. It happened this way. I was alone in this house. I shut myself in—of course, I was afraid. And then I began to love it. This house became the house of writing. My books come from this house. From this light as well, and from the garden. From the light reflecting off the pond. It has taken me twenty years to write what I just said.”
“There is something suicidal in a writer’s solitude. One is alone even in one’s own solitude. Always inconceivable. Always dangerous. Yes. The price one pays for having dared go out and scream.”
“A writer is an odd thing. He’s a contradiction, and he makes no sense. Writing also means not speaking. Keeping silent. Screaming without sound. A writer is often quite restful; she listens a lot. She doesn’t speak much because it’s impossible to speak to someone about a book one has written, and especially about a book one is writing. It’s impossible. It’s the opposite of the cinema, the theater, and other performances. It’s the opposite of any kind of reading. It’s the hardest of all. It’s the worst. Because a book is the unknown, it’s night, it’s closed off, and that’s that. It’s the book that advances, grows, advances in directions one thought one had explored; that advances toward its own fate and the fate of its author, who is annihilated by its publication: her separation from it, the dream book, like the last-born child, always the best loved.”
“The person who writes books must always be enveloped by a separation from others.”
“I think that if I had played piano professionally, I would never have written books.”
“it is in a house that one is alone. not outside it, but inside. outside, in the garden, there are birds and cats. and also, once, a squirrel, and a ferret. one isn't alone in a garden. but inside the house, one is so alone that one can lose one's bearings.”
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Book Keywords:
books, thing, writing, alone, magic, life, writing-solitude, populated, house
