“I don’t write to forget what happened; I write to remember. There are worse things in life than painful desire; one of them is to have no desire.”
“Educators often justify art courses and creative writing courses on the grounds that self-expression can teach students about themselves. That may be true to some extent, but many creative writers have been quite capable of powerfully emotive writing while lacking insight into the internal conflicts that drive their suffering. While they may not gain insight, they still gain a sense of relief – and a sympathetic audience.”
“Several factors besides skill are more significant in professional writers than in most amateurs. One is love of the surface level of language: the sound of it; the taste of it on the tongue; what it can be made to do in virtuosic passages that exist only for their own sake, like cadenzas in baroque concerti. Writers in love with their tools are not unlike surgeons obsessed with their scalpels, or Arctic sled racers who sleep among their dogs even when they don’t have to.
“Amateur writers tend to write primarily for self-expression, whereas writers able to become professional can hide or transform their own agenda enough that they are of interest to others.”
– The Midnight Disease by Alice W. Flaherty
-taken from literaryquotes
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