Victor Serge Quotes

Writing is the starting point from which all goodness (and crappiness) flows.

We don't often talk about the fact that writing is all about rhythm. When you get too up in your head, you can lose a lot of your writing. Sometimes what a writer really needs to do is go dancing.

I don't know anything but writing practice, and so what I really do is direct that energy as if it were flowing down a river.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. ... It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Writers . . . write to give reality to experience.

If your life is worth thinking about,it is worth writing about.

I've always known that I've wanted to write, but I always saw myself doing that in the context of something other than film, so it was a really beautiful and kind of perfect moment in my life when I realized that I could combine this idea of wanting to write and tell my own stories with the environment I had grown up in and knew well - that I could make film as opposed to writing being a departure from what I knew.

I didn't become a writer to write about me.

- I don't want to be a writer so I can write about my life. I want to be a writer to escape from it. + Then you shouldn't be a writer.

To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.

Better to think of writing, of what one does, as an activity, rather than an identity to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun.

Writing is a strong easement for perplexity. My life is a map, spread out with all the rivers and hills showing.

A couple months after my heart attack, fifty-seven years after I'd given it up, I started to write again. I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn't matter if I found the words, and more than that, I knew it would be impossible to find the right ones.

Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is used and nothing is lost. Because it's something to do to pass the time until she is old enough to experience the things she writes about.

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

In my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one. Just as the past Lingers in the present, all my writings after night, including those that deal with biblical, Talmudic, or Hasidic themes, profoundly bear it's stamp, and cannot be understood if one has not read this very first of my works. Why did I write it? Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of the madness, the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind?

Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.

I always felt through writing that I wanted to rotate the world slightly.

I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.

I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.

Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.

Gertrude Stein said, "I write for myself and strangers." I would say I write for myself, strangers and the great dead.

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.

I kinda write in sequences that I live through.

I'm not typing. I write only by longhand. I've always written first drafts by hand and then once I was into a second or third draft I wrote insert pages on a typewriter. But I got rid of all my typewriters about three or four novels ago and now I do everything by hand. I write by hand because it makes me go slow and going slow is what I like.