A Quote by Janet Malcolm
As an observer, I'm analysing my reactions, I guess, and my thinking; but about the process of writing... I am not very talented at talking about what I do as a writer.
Related Quotes
If you're writing, you're a writer. If you're talking about it or thinking about it, I'm not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight percent work and two percent magic.
Thinking is creating with God, as thinking is writing with the ready writer; and worlds are only leaves turned over in the process of composition, about his throne.
I think anyone who has had a fight and who's a very good observer of the situation and people's behavior is capable of writing a fight. But you do start thinking about writing during the fights that you have with your partner.
I tend to learn things physically - I guess it's my dance training. I never want to make too many choices too soon - so, while I am thinking about the character and thinking about her history, which is very vague in terms of what is given in the text, I am starting to have ideas about what her home is.
My thought process when I'm on the court is always thinking about getting better, and thinking about how I'm playing. Thinking about it as a process, as the big picture and what I need to work on, instead of being close-minded and thinking, 'I'm so nervous and have to win this match, if I don't, it'll be the worst.'
I am a very emotional person. I basically think and feel in emotion, so writing is much easier for me than communicating by voice or by talking to somebody just because I can really get into the emotion more succinctly with writing. So I guess that's what makes me a better writer than speaker.
A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.
I'm a writer who simply can't know what I'm writing about until the writing lets me discover it. In a sense, my writing process embraces the gapped nature of my memory process, leaping across spaces that represent all I've lost and establishing fresh patterns within all that remains.
I'm a writer, not an editor, and though the editing rarely cut into my writing time, it did take away from that walking-around-thinking-about-it-when-you're-not-thinking-about-it time that I think is important for writers. When you're half-thinking about what you're working on while driving, cooking . . . just letting things sift and settle, come to you.
I had at some point the epiphany that if I wanted to be a writer, maybe I should stop thinking about writing, or stop writing about writing, and actually write.
'I never feel the need to discuss my work with anyone. No, I am too busy writing it. It has got to please me and if it does I don't need to talk about it. If it doesn't please me, talking about it won't improve it, since the only thing to improve it is to work on it some more. I am not a literary man but only a writer. I don't get any pleasure from talking shop.
When I've taught writing to five, six, and seven year olds, it's not very different than talking to an adult writer. They're writers then, and when they get to be young teenagers they're not anymore. You might go and talk to them about writing, and they'll be very self-conscious or will have detached themselves from the group.
One of the goals of analysis is you become your own analyst. You continue the process even if you're not in therapy, whether you continue the process by walking down the street thinking about things or whether you continue the process, as I do, by writing about them.
I am keenly aware that in writing about my mother, I am writing about my aunts' sister, and that in writing about my grandmother, I'm writing about their mother. I know that my honesty about how my view of these people has changed over the years may be painful.
I am not talking about you being a spectator, I am talking about involvement. I am talking about involving yourself into life in such a way that you dissolve into it.
'Don't Kill My Vibe' was made in a writing session, by Martin Sjolie and I, after he'd asked me what I'd been thinking about lately. I started talking about this earlier writing session that was quite difficult. The song is about the feeling of not being respected as a person, and I think that's something that speaks to millennials.
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