Blogging isn’t just a way to organize your research—it’s a way to do research for a book or essay or story or speech you don’t even know you want to write yet. It’s a way to discover what your future books and essays and stories and speeches will be about.”
— Cory Doctorow, “The Memex Method“
I write because…well, the best I can say for it is it’s a psychological quark of mine developed in response to whatever personal failings I have.”
— Zadie Smith, Intimations: Six Essays
Writing is control. The part of the university in which I teach should properly be called the Controlling Experience Department. Experience—mystifying, overwhelming, conscious, subconscious—rolls over everybody. We try to adapt, to learn, to accommodate, sometimes resisting, other times submitting to, whatever confronts us. But writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pour it into a mold of their own devising. Writing is all resistance””
— Zadie Smith, Intimations: Six Essays
If you can work in such a way that the process will be pleasurable enough that even if nothing comes of it, the work is an end in and of itself—then you’ll be ok. It’s not a means to an end, the work is an end.”
— Jia Tolentino, On writing for the sake of writing
Oh, you do me wrong. Would I do anything wicked? I’m a peaceful soul, bothering nobody and leading a gentle, herbivorous life. And my thoughts merely drift among the oddities and quarks of how things are (as I see them). I, humble observer of phenomena, plod along and puff my silly words into the air rather unspectacularly, I am afraid.”
— Tortoise, Godel Escher Bach, Douglas Hofstadter
There is no more efficient way to expose your own mundanity than through writing. So be it. Perhaps the mundane has some minor value.”
How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or your real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared released a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightning bolt? What are the best things and the worst things in your life and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?”
— Ray Bradbury
“For me, writing is really just learning about things that interest me, and then trying to convince you to find them as interesting as I do.”
— Susan Orlean (via Austen Kleon)
“Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.”
— Donald Winnicott, psychoanalyst (via Dana Levin)
