Marguerite Duras Quotes

I like the busy-ness of office life. What I discovered, to my surprise, is that I love the solitary nature of writing. What happens is that you write when you're ready.

Anyone who writes knows that ultimately the majority of your time is spent alone in a room with a piano or a guitar, no matter what the project is.

The reason there's no modern-day Shakespeare is because he didn't have anything to do except sit in a room with a candle and think.

I think I'm a born storyteller. Inspiration is all around me. I can read a newspaper article and come up with an idea for a book.

I think what happens is that some writers, who are so great in television or whatever, once they become successful, they get out of the loop of real life. It's real hard to draw on something to write.

I didn't really get serious about my own writing until I was convinced it was something that I wanted to do, that I wanted to spend that much time alone.

When you're writing, it's a very solitary job. It's you and your word processor and a cup of tea.

I wrote in the cellar for a number of years. I needed a private space, and it had a furnace, so it was always warm.

Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.

Writing a book is incredibly pleasurable, but very solitary. You have total control, but sometimes that can drive you insane.

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 always writing. It's kind of a curse: You never stop. But I need isolation to write. So the real meat of the material comes when I'm off the road.

As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

When I'm really plugged in I find it difficult to write. It's like digging a well. If you make a void, something moves in to fill it. Writing books is like that. It's mostly about freeing up time, doing nothing, and in that time some writing starts to happen. We need to figure out how to maintain those voids.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.

I love to write when I feel like everybody else is asleep and when I feel like the world is kind of empty in some ways. I find, oddly enough, that I write about loneliness and isolation a lot.

Once your mind is caught on the right snag, there's nothing so hard about the mechanics of writing.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write.

If you write, good ideas must come welling up into you so that you have something to write. If good ideas do not come at once, or for a long time, do not be troubled at all. Wait for them. Put down little ideas no matter how insignificant they are. But do not feel, any more, guilty about idleness and solitude.