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Vivian Gornick Quotes about Writing

All Vivian Gornick Quotes Feminism Heart Literature Pain Science Understanding Writing quotes
Writing enters into us when it gives us information about ourselves we are in need of *at the time that we are reading.* How obvious the thought seems once it has been articulated! As with love, politics, or friendship:

Writing enters into us when it gives us information about ourselves we are in need of *at the time that we are reading.* How obvious the thought seems once it has been articulated! As with love, politics, or friendship: readiness is all.

Vivian Gornick
Fun, Reading, Writing

What you feel when you're writing is the relief of thinking: if you write the sentence correctly, you're clarifying. If you write the right sentence, nothing feels as good.

Vivian Gornick
Writing, Thinking, Relief
"'We knew we were not liberated and were never going to be liberated. But we knew what liberation was'". Interview with Hayden Bennett, believermagblog.wordpress.com. March 24, 2014.

I don't write fiction but I do write narrative; I write memoirs that I treat like stories, so whenever I'm using somebody I actually know as a model, I am submitting them to the agenda of a storyteller, and I feel free to do what I want.

Vivian Gornick
Writing, Fiction, Stories
Source: www.believermag.com

The telephone conversation is, by its very nature, reactive, not reflective. Immediacy is its prime virtue. ... The letter, written in absorbed solitude, is an act of faith: it assumes the presence of humanity: world and self are generated from within: loneliness is courted, not feared. To write a letter is to be alone with my thoughts in the conjured presence of another person. I keep myself imaginative company. I occupy the empty room.

Vivian Gornick
Loneliness, Writing, Empty Rooms

The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it's the wisdom-or rather the movement toward it-that counts.

Vivian Gornick
Writing, Novelists, Engagement
Vivian Gornick (2002). “The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative”, p.14, Macmillan

You can't reduce an actual human being; you're just writing! You're not doing anything to another person.

Vivian Gornick
Writing, Humans, Persons
"We knew we were not liberated and were never going to be liberated. But we knew what liberation was". The Believer Interview, believermag.com. March 24, 2014.

I was never an activist, in the sense that I didn't really join a lot of organizations. I wasn't out in the streets. But what I did become was a writer. My activism was in writing.

Vivian Gornick
Writing, Organization, Activism
Interview with Madeleine Schwartz, www.believermag.com. March 2014.

They may recognize themselves in what you're writing, and then they have to say, "Well, she doesn't see me as I see myself." All a writer has is her own experience, and that experience comes out of human relationships.

Vivian Gornick
Writing, May, Wells
"We knew we were not liberated and were never going to be liberated. But we knew what liberation was". The Believer Interview, believermag.com. March 24, 2014.

What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.

Vivian Gornick
Writing, What Matters, Able

When the whole world is writing letters, it's easy to lap into the quiet within, tell the story of an hour, keep alive the narrating inner life. To be alone in the presence of one's thought is not a value, only a common practice.

Vivian Gornick
Writing, Thoughtful, Thinking

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