August is a month for travelling … and for reading and dreaming and enjoying all the pleasures of summer.
“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world.“
— Freya Stark
“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.”
— Augustine of Hippo
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
— Marcel Proust
Whenever I’m writing and the words don’t come, I find it helps to seek inspiration from the wisdom of other writers, (past and present), who have found a way to make peace with their muse, and the all potential and possibilities of the empty page …
“So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.”
— Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary
“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”
— Anne Lamott
“The more we have at stake, the harder it is to make the leap into writing. The more we think about who’s going to read it, what they’re going to think, how many copies will be printed, whether this magazine or that magazine will accept it for publication, the further away we are from accomplishing anything alive on the page.”
― Dani Shapiro, Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life
“I have stacks of notebooks that contain this terribly clumsy writing, which is just getting anything down. I often wonder, when I look at these first drafts, if there was any point in doing this at all. I’m the opposite of a writer with a quick gift, you know, someone who gets it piped in. I don’t grasp it very readily at all, the ‘it’ being whatever I’m trying to do. I often get on the wrong track and have to haul myself back.”
— Alice Munro
“All writers are double, for the simple reason that you can never actually meet the author of the book you have just read. Too much time has elapsed between composition and publication, and the person who wrote the book is now a different person.”
“What is the relationship between the two entities we lump under one name, that of ‘the writer’? The particular writer. By two, I mean the person who exists when no writing is going forward — the one who walks the dog, eats bran for regularity, takes the car in to be washed, and so forth — and that other, more shadowy and altogether more equivocal personage who shares the same body, and who, when no one is looking, takes it over and uses it to commit the actual writing.”
— Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: a Writer on Writing
