When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.
Interpretation
Writing is an inherent need for some individuals, regardless of circumstances.
This quote by Julio Cortazar highlights the innate drive of a writer to express themselves through writing. It suggests that whether motivated by desire or obligation, the act of writing is an essential part of the writer's existence, indicating a deep connection to the craft that transcends external factors.
In practice
In a speech at a literary festival to inspire aspiring writers.
La Maga did not know that my kisses were like eyes which began to open up beyond her, and that I went along outside as if I saw a different concept of the world, the dizzy pilot of a black prow which cut the water of time and negated it.
Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.
The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film. I donβt want to write anything but takes.
Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.
As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. (...) You don't pick out the rain that soaks you to the skin when you come out of a concert.
You're like a witness. You're the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you're in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I'm a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you're in the room but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room.
There is a music for lonely hearts nearly always. If the music dies down there is a silence. Almost the same as the movement of music. To know silence perfectly is to know music.
A song is the exultation of the mind dwelling on eternal things, bursting forth in the voice.
Before 'Lord of the Rings,' some people would have just classed Peter Jackson as a horror director. But there is a mind there.
I was a product of Andy Warhol's Factory. All I did was sit there and observe these incredibly talented and creative people who were continually making art, and it was impossible not to be affected by that.
The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system.
I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren't allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.
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