Asne Seierstad Quotes

It's not easy keeping a diary. You have to be pretty committed.

After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.

In order to judge properly, one must get away somewhat from what one is judging, after having loved it. This is true of countries, of persons, and of oneself.

I'm kind of a hermit. it's almost easier for me to write about connection than to actually connect.

Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn't write to others any more; one writes to oneself.

Because there's just so much in a day now, I keep writing in much more abstract terms, like I don't try to write about what happened anymore. It would be impossible.

By the time I was writing the second book, my life had changed rather dramatically, thanks to the intervention of television, and I needed to find a way to discuss that. Otherwise the big, fake book would not be true on some level.

Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done.

I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority).

(The new boyfriend) knows I write every day for hours but has no idea that all I’m writing about is me. It seems wiser to let him think I’m an aspiring novelist instead of just an alcoholic with a year of sobriety who spends eight hours a day writing about the other 16.

Sometimes I have that kind of critical mind to myself as well. This is because there are times where I have to do things that I don't wish to.

I do my best to write my way through it. It helps the laughing, reflective part come quicker.

My journals were a clearing house - a garbage can. Once I was writing seriously, I understood that this was the stuff that didn't belong in my work.

I actually didn't want to have control of the writing on my first album. To write, you have to have time to connect with yourself. I don't have that time right now, because I'm so busy.

We are contemporary citizens living in a technological world. Swimming in crosscultural waters can be dangerous, and if you are honest you can't stay there very long. Sooner or later you have to look at your own reflection and decide what to do with yourself. We are urban people. We make periodic pilgrimages to the country. . . . If we align ourselves with the spirit of place we will find humility fused with joy. The land holds stories.

I'm boggled by the idea of being an only child. I know nothing at all (I'm happy to say) about having had a cold and withholding mother, about being divorced. The more I've been writing novels, each novel I've written has become successively less grounded in anything approaching autobiography.

That's what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.

I didn't feel up to writing about 9/11. If I were to write about it, it would take me years.

If I can write everything out plainly, perhaps I will myself understand better what has happened.

Give me a paper and pen, so I can write about my life of sin. A couple of bottles of gin, in case I don't get in.

I come from a place of darkness when I write because I'm always trying to figure things out. It's kind of like my own therapy when I write music. It's me working through my own problems hopefully. And putting it into a song.

The crisis is not out there in the world, it is within our own consciousness.

The good diarist writes either for himself alone or for a posterity so distant that it can safely hear every secret and justly weigh every motive. For such an audience there is need neither of affectation nor of restraint. Sincerity is what they ask, detail, and volume; skill with the pen comes in conveniently, but brilliance is not necessary; genius is a hindrance even; and should you know your business and do it manfully, posterity will let you off mixing with great men, reporting famous affairs, or having lain with the first ladies in the land.

I quit Paris unwillingly, because I must part from my friends; and I quit the country unwillingly, because I must part from myself.

You have to be an outsider to write.