Isak Dinesen Writing Quotations

Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.

The divine art is the story.

I was young, and by instinct of self-preservation I had to collect my energy on something, if I were not to be whirled away with the dusk on the farm-roads, or the smoke on the plain. I begun in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales, and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times.

All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.

I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.