“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
More from Anaïs Nin on Writing
“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.”
“I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.”
Others on Writing
Ernest Hemingway
17 quotes“A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.”
Virginia Woolf
12 quotes“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”
Somerset Maugham
12 quotes“The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.”
Salman Rushdie
11 quotes“A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.”
Kafka
10 quotes“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
Ray Bradbury
9 quotes“And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and...”
Flaubert
9 quotes“Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of gen...”
Jorge Luis Borges
8 quotes“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
Flannery O'Connor
7 quotes“The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem.”
Harold Bloom
7 quotes“All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home.”
Madeleine L'Engle
6 quotes“A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”
William Faulkner
6 quotes“A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.”