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Fernando Pessoa Quotes about Writing

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Writing is like paying myself a formal visit.

Writing is like paying myself a formal visit.

Fernando Pessoa
Writing, Formal
Fernando Pessoa (2017). “The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition”, p.298, Serpent's Tail

I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing; it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.

Fernando Pessoa
Book, Writing, Thinking
"The Book of Disquiet".

If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.

Fernando Pessoa
Writing, Feelings, Fever
Fernando Pessoa (2007). “The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa”, p.324, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

When I write, I solemnly visit myself.

Fernando Pessoa
Writing
"The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa (1982). Translated by Richard Zenith, p. 287, 2006.

In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.

Fernando Pessoa
Dream, Writing, Years

Your poems are of interest to mankind; your liver isn't. Drink till you write well and feel sick. Bless your poems and be damned to you.

Fernando Pessoa
Writing, Sick, Drink
"The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa (1982). Translated by Richard Zenith, p. 229, 2006.

I sometimes think, with a sad delight, that if one day, in a future I no longer belong to, these sentences, that I write, last with praise, I will at last have the people who understand me, those mine, the true family to be born in and be loved... I will only be understood in effigy, when affection no longer repays the dead the unaffection that was, when living.

Fernando Pessoa
Writing, Thinking, People
"The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa, p. 182, 1982.

If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.

Fernando Pessoa
Writing, Two, People

Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes.

Fernando Pessoa
Dream, Writing, Voice
Fernando Pessoa (2007). “The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa”, p.321, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

I have at this moment so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write any more, not to think any more, but to allow the fever of speaking to make me sleepy, and with my eyes closed, like a cat, I play with everything I could have said.

Fernando Pessoa
Writing, Tired, Cat

We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life.

Fernando Pessoa
Hurt, Writing, Soul

These pages are not my confession; they’re my definition. And I feel, as I begin to write it, that I can write it with some semblance of truth.

Fernando Pessoa
Writing, Definitions, Pages
Fernando Pessoa, Richard Zenith (2002). “The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa”, p.302, Grove Press

I don't write in Portuguese. I write myself.

Fernando Pessoa
Writing, Language, Portuguese
"The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa (1982). Translated by Richard Zenith, p. 353, 2006.

If a man can only write well when drunk, I'll tell him: get drunk. And if he tells me that his liver suffers with it, I'll answer: what's your liver? It's a dead thing that lives as long as you live, and the poems you'll write will live without a as long as.

Fernando Pessoa
Writing, Men, Long
"The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa, p.229, 1982.

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