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Simone de Beauvoir Quotes about Writing

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Writing ... is a profession that can only be learned by writing.

Writing ... is a profession that can only be learned by writing.

Simone de Beauvoir
Writing, Profession
Simone de Beauvoir (1965). “The prime of life”

The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.

Simone de Beauvoir
Powerful, Writing, Bad Ass

Only a woman can write what it is to feel as a woman, to be a woman.

Simone de Beauvoir
Writing, Feels
Source: www.iaphitalia.org

At the moment of their emancipation, women have a need to write their own histories.

Simone de Beauvoir
Writing, Needs, Moments
Source: www.iaphitalia.org

‎A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes.

Simone de Beauvoir
Writing, Ashes, Taste

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.

Simone de Beauvoir
Beautiful, Writing, Style
Source: www.iaphitalia.org

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.

Simone de Beauvoir
Sex, Writing, Mean
Source: www.iaphitalia.org

Writing is a trade ... which is learned by writing.

Simone de Beauvoir
Writing, Worship, Trade

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.

Simone de Beauvoir
Running, Writing, Sleep
Simone de Beauvoir (1977). “Force of circumstance”

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!

Simone de Beauvoir
Lying, Reading, Writing

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.

Simone de Beauvoir
Writing, Men, Body
Source: www.iaphitalia.org

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.

Simone de Beauvoir
Kings, Writing, Men
Source: www.iaphitalia.org

There has to be a certain relationship between the life and the writing style, and that is really a problem.

Simone de Beauvoir
Writing, Style, Problem
Source: www.iaphitalia.org

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.

Simone de Beauvoir
Sex, Writing, Thinking
Source: www.iaphitalia.org

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.

Simone de Beauvoir
Writing, Men, Way
Source: www.iaphitalia.org

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.

Simone de Beauvoir
Commitment, Writing, Thinking
Source: www.iaphitalia.org

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.

Simone de Beauvoir
Jobs, Writing, Men
Source: www.iaphitalia.org

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.

Simone de Beauvoir
Writing, Class, People
Source: www.iaphitalia.org

A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.

Simone de Beauvoir
Book, Writing, Men
Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

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.

Simone de Beauvoir
Writing, Thinking, Want
Source: www.iaphitalia.org

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