Derrick Jensen Quotes

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

What is writing but an expression of my own life?

I don't fiddle or edit or change while I'm going through that first draft.

I try to begin writing as close to a dreamlike state as I can get.

The writing that feels the best to me, I experience sometimes, is a kind of weirdly deep listening - like, it feels like if you just listen hard enough, the next sentence will tell you what it needs to be.

There are a lot of elements when you're writing, or when I'm writing, that are sitting in the back of your mind. I try to let them stay there, because they find their way in more naturally that way.

I try to sort of make myself emotional in the moment when I'm writing, and that always translates better. When I'm writing, I can't do abstract.

I don't consciously think of any certain direction when I'm writing. I only try not to be repetitive or redundant.

Not intending to be funny: I sit at the keyboard, put my fingers on the keys and go. To me, it's the real secret of writing. Put yourself in front of the screen or the blank sheet of paper and get to work.

A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you're in his life, he uses yours, too.

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.

When it comes time to write the book itself I'll shut the lights out, picture the scene I'm about to write then close my eyes and go at it. Yes, I can touch type.

I write in a rush of memory.

You know how sometimes you hear a chord played on an organ and you can feel it vibrating in your bones? Sometimes when I'm writing, I can feel my bones vibrating because I'll have a thought or I'll have a character's voice in my head, and that's when I know I'm on the right track.

There aren't a lot of 'Aha!' moments in writing.

When asked, 'How do you write?' I invariably answer, 'one word at a time.'

Write in a disciplined manner, but write in a way that is natural to the individual's thought processes.

My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won't necessarily write chapter two after chapter one.

The elegance and the quality - the talent is always in the literature. I start with the word and I base everything on that. It doesn't make any difference to me.

I'm a writer, and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself.

Ignore all advice about writing. Leave your blood on every page. Every page!

Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in people's minds with emotion.

It is comparatively easy to become a writer; staying a writer, resisting formulaic work, generating one's own creativity - that's a much tougher matter.

I think we have a great deal of mythology around writing. We believe that only a few people can really do it. I wrote a book called 'The Right to Write.' In it, I argued that all of us have the capacity to write. That it's as normal to write as it is to speak.

The writing part of my life never changes, because that's just when the inspiration comes.