May Sarton Writing Quotations

Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.

When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.

I live alone, perhaps for no good reason, for the reason that I am an impossible creature, set apart by a temperament I have never learned to use as it could be used, thrown off by a word, a glance, a rainy day, or one drink too many. My need to be alone is balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge empty silence if I cannot find support there. I go up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour, and keep alive only by imposing upon myself inexorable routines. I write too many letters and too few poems.

I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.

I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.

...I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except when I'm making love. Two things when you forget time, when nothing exists except the moment--the moment of writing, the moment of love. That perfect concentration is bliss.

If one is the kind of creature I am and wants to do the kind of writing I want to do, an undisturbed bourgeois existence with no distractions seems in order. A single meeting outside the family upsets one's whole inner web, makes one start off on two-days' thinking and weighing, destroys a delicate balance etc. etc. ... I now have enough friends to last me a lifetime and that is enough. I am going to close the doors and hibernate at least for a couple of years. I am frightfully depressed about my work. It seems to me perfectly mediocre.

have the courage to write whatever your dream is for yourself.

I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.

We have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe, or work can-if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough-be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being.

I’m only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me.

I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.

And I refuse to feel guilty about not letter-writing either. There are times when one can, times when one can't. In the times when an enormous amount of living is going on, one can't.

I am furious at all the letters to answer, when all I want to do is think and write poems. ... I long for open time, with no obligations except toward the inner world and what is going on there.

It is dangerous it seems to me for a civilization when there is a complete abyss betewen people in general and the artists. Or is it always so? The poets who are most ardently on the people's side write in such a way that the people cannot see rhyme nor reason to their work.

poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.