Amelie Nothomb Quotes

I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.

Thank God for being a writer, because you do sort of find out what you think by the process of writing.

I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.

The most real dialogue for me is when I am alone, writing.

The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.

During the act of writing I have told myself something that I didn't know I knew.

I write to discover what I think.

I write to find out what I think.

It is for this, partly, that I write. How can I know what I think unless I see what I write.

The writer needs to react to his or her own internal universe, to his or her own point of view. If he or she doesn't have a personal point of view, it's impossible to be a creator.

Our scribblings are usually not lyrics but whirrings, without colour or resonance, like the tone of an engine-wheel. I believe that the cause lies in the fact that when people write, they forget for the most part to dig deeply into themselves and to feel the whole import and truth of what they are writing.

I tend to write from a personal place, and most of the time when I'm writing by myself, it's coming from something I've experienced.

I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.

When we write we begin to taste the texture of our own mind

Writing helped me understand what I was thinking about.

I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.

In the best writers, the outward-reaching interest in the 'found subject' leads back at a hairpin to some uncomfortable inner recognition that the writer has journeyed very far to see; he comes home half-dead.

There is always going to be a little bit of me in each character.

If you write something that's personal, there's going to be elements of yourself in it.

I may attempt a novel. I think that no matter what you write, it requires being honest with oneself, and you have to pull yourself out of the whirlwind of daily life.

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

Every writer, to some extent, writes about himself.

The reason I write is that I'm not in dialogue with my emotions; writing puts me in touch with myself.

Writing helps me process things that are happening to me.

I use a stream-of-consciousness approach; if you don't censor yourself, you end up with what you're most concerned about, but you haven't filtered it through your conscious mind. Then you craft it.