C. Day Lewis Quotes

I write to understand as much as to be understood.

I write to make sense of things that don't make sense to me.

Many times I have written something, and after it was published, I understood what I was saying.

I didn't write because I had anything to say, but in order to find out what there was to say.

I really value words. I really try to illustrate and let people draw their own conclusions.

To reject the word is to reject the human search.

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

To be a writer is to connect and to play and to attempt to see clearly and understand. It astounds me regularly that feeling things deeply and writing them down is basically my job description.

The more I talk about things, the more I understand myself.

Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

I aim to be translucent, so you don't notice the words, just their meaning. I haven't much insight into people's motivations.

Sometimes writing it is a good way to understand something.

Writing has got to be an act of discovery....I write to find out what I'm thinking about.

The writing begins when you’ve finished. Only then do you know what you’re trying to say.

Words build bridges into unexplored regions.

I think writing is really about a journey of understanding. So you take something that seems very far away, and the more you write about it, the more you travel into it, and you see it from within.

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.

I'm here to make sense.

It's technically extremely difficult to get down what you really mean, not what you think you mean, or what you think sounds good, but what's really there, what you really have to express, in words that somehow convey that meaning in an approximate way.

I need to be able to explain myself in context.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

Words are powerful. When I make mistakes I just try to come back and clarify what I meant.

What writing does is to reveal.

Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.