Writing
Quotes
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I was five years old when I wrote my first song. It was out of longing for my father that I wrote it.
Speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm, 1966
I don't know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I'll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are.
The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989
Writers haven't got any rockets to blast off. We don't even trundle the most insignificant auxiliary vehicle. We haven't got any military might. So what can literature do in the face of the merciless onslaught of open violence? One word of truth outweighs the whole world.
A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
Give the reader hell. Stretch the reader.
It takes three or four years before the present day sinks in to you as a novelist. It has not just to be accepted in the mind but travel down your spine and fill your body and you can�t respond immediately to immediate events, there is this incubation period.
The easier a thing is to write then the more the writer gets paid for writing it. (And vice versa: ask the poets at the bus stop.)
Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.
A writer�s life is half ambition and half anxiety, and there has to be both. It is no good writing a novel and feeling fine, and it is no good writing a whole novel feeling miserable. It has to be both, that mixture of anxiety and ambition, and you get that with every novel, but more so when you write about these epics of human suffering. I felt that just as much when I wrote about the Gulag. Every writer knows what that is. The process goes� you have to think: �This novel I am writing is no good.� Then you have to think: �All my novels are no good.� And then, when you reach that point, you can begin.
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On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays
Essays