Simone de Beauvoir Quotes About Writing
-
Writing ... is a profession that can only be learned by writing.
→ -
Writing is a trade ... which is learned by writing.
→ -
There are jobs that can be done equally well by men or by women and that finally you can't see a difference. But from the moment that you involve yourself fully in writing a novel, for example, or an essay, then you are involved as a woman, in the same way that you can't deny your nationality - you are French, you are a man, you are a woman... all this passes into the writing.
→ -
A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes.
→ -
Anais Nin shows an occasional grace in writing, but her work is quite foreign to me, precisely because she wants so much to be feminine and not feminist. And then she is so gaga before so many men. She talks about men I know in France, men who were less than nothing, and she considers them kings, extraordinary people.
→ -
I think it's wrong to write in a totally esoteric language when you want to talk about things which interest a multitude of women.
→ -
I consider it almost antifeminist to say that there is a feminine nature which expresses itself differently, that a woman speaks her body more than a man, because after all, men also speak their bodies when they write. Everything is implicated in the work of a writer.
→ -
I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.
→ -
There has to be a certain relationship between the life and the writing style, and that is really a problem.
→ -
Virginia Woolf thought a lot about her own sex when she wrote. In the best sense of the word, her writing is very feminine, and by that I mean that women are supposed to be very sensitive to all the sensations of nature, much more so than men, much more contemplative. It's this quality that marks her best works.
→ -
I willingly trust myself to chance. I let my thoughts wander, I digress, not only sitting at my work, but all day long, all night even. It often happens that a sentence suddenly runs through my head before I go to bed, or when I am unable to sleep, and I get up again and write it down.
→ -
There is something false in this search for a purely feminine writing style. Language, such as it is, is inherited from a masculine society, and it contains many male prejudices. We must rid language of all that. Still, a language is not something created artificially; the proletariat can't use a different language from the bourgeoisie, even if they use it differently, even if from time to time they invent something, technical words or even a kind of worker's slang, which can be very beautiful and very rich. Women can do that as well, enrich their language, clean it up.
→ -
Only a woman can write what it is to feel as a woman, to be a woman.
→ -
A man of the right doesn't write in the same way as a man of the left, you can see that right away, or a woman of the right or a woman of the left.
→ -
There are moments when you have to write certain things and you don't have to think of your sex. If you are writing about the population of the thirteenth district in Paris, even if you are writing on the women in the thirteenth district, there's no need to consider your sex.
→ -
There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial...Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost...I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself!
→ -
If you are writing something in which you are really involved, you don't even need to think about it any longer. The situation itself demands your total commitment as an individual, just as in your political commitments.
→ -
The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.
→ -
At the moment of their emancipation, women have a need to write their own histories.
→ -
A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.
→ -
What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms of the dominant class.
→
Related Authors
-
Soren Kierkegaard Philosopher -
Mary Wollstonecraft Writer -
Virginia Woolf Writer -
Luce Irigaray Philosopher -
Friedrich Nietzsche Philologist -
Judith Butler Philosopher -
Claude Lanzmann Filmmaker -
Albert Camus Author -
Simone Weil Philosopher -
Martin Heidegger Philosopher -
Karl Marx Philosopher -
Jean-Paul Sartre Philosopher -
Maurice Merleau-Ponty Philosopher -
Hannah Arendt Philosopher -
Olympe de Gouges Playwright -
Betty Friedan Writer -
Michel Foucault Philosopher -
Simone Veil Lawyer -
Violette Leduc Author -
Nelson Algren Film writer