Elie Wiesel Quotes

To write has to be related to a drive inside.

The very impulse to write springs from an inner chaos crying for order - for meaning.

The things that have always drawn me to the craft of writing is character, it's story, it's something that becomes like a pebble in my shoe, a voice that I just can't get rid of, and I've got to see it through.

Every piece of writing I've done has been something where I feel like I need to get this out of me, whether it's a seed of something personal or an anxiety that turns into a play or an image that's in my mind and haunts me that I'm trying to investigate.

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.

I find it painful when I'm without anything. But I work in multiple fields. If I can't write, I find myself taking photographs. I can go on the road and perform. But the most important thing for me is writing, and when I hit those walls, it's painful.

Rage is to writers what water is to fish.

It is essential that the revelation we receive, the conception of an image which embraces a certain thing, which has no sense in itself, which has no subject, which means 'absolutely nothing' from the logical point of view.. ..should speak so strongly in us, evoke such agony or joy, that we feel compelled to paint.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

Actually, when I write, there is a feeling of necessity, of something that is stronger than myself that demands that I must write as I write.

One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.

There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.

In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

Why do I write? I guess that's been asked of every writer. I don't know. It isn't any massive compulsion.

I think many writers write because it's a convenient way to explain themselves to themselves. We take the chaos and the turmoil and the bullshit of our lives, and we make it into something that has a harmonious shape and sound.

Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning.

I write for fanboy moments. I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of. I write to do all the things the viewers want too. So the intensity of the fan response is enormously gratifying. It means I hit a nerve.

What is an artist? He's a man who has antennae, who knows how to hook up to the currents which are in atmosphere, in the cosmos.

You have total control of it, and when you're an actor, you're subject to production design and costumes and directors and studio choices and producer choices, but when you're writing it, you're creating your own little world in your head, peopled with your little characters. No one is in there monkeying with it, at least not at first - though they will. With this and the other projects I'm working on, it'll have to be given away, and it'll have to be someone else's property.

I'm never going to be a Tom Clancy. And I wouldn't really want to be - not that I have anything against him, and I wish him continued success - because that's not why I'm writing novels. I'm doing it because I have to. I feel like I have to, anyway.

The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.

He who desires nothing, hopes for nothing, and is afraid of nothing, cannot be an artist.

I have an impulse to write all over the orange walls- I need an alphabet of endings ripped out of books, of hands pulled off of clocks, of cold stones, of shoes filled with nothing but wind.