Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Vivian Gornick
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: June 14
Critic
Essayist
Historian
Memoirist
The Bronx
New York City
Feel
Clarifying
Feels
Correctly
Writing
Sentence
Good
Relief
Thinking
Sentences
Write
Nothing
Right

More quotes by Vivian Gornick

Image
I may cause someone to feel badly, not because I'm doing something to them, but because the way in which I see might cause pain. But I am not doing the hurting.
Vivian Gornick
Image
What feminism did was make clear for me how much I longed for clarity. I got married twice, each time in a fog. I had so many complicated feelings I couldn't understand.
Vivian Gornick
Image
Of course love is a force in life. People will go on falling in love forever. And more important, sexual infatuation will enrapture everyone. Otherwise, no babies!
Vivian Gornick
Image
Whatever a scientist is doing - reading, cooking, talking, playing - science thoughts are always there at the edge of the mind. They are the way the world is taken in all that is seen is filtered through an everpresent scientific musing.
Vivian Gornick
Image
You are the instrument of your own illumination.
Vivian Gornick
Image
You can't reduce an actual human being you're just writing! You're not doing anything to another person.
Vivian Gornick
Image
When cafe life thrives, talk is a shared limberness of the mind that improves appetite for conversation: an adequate sentence maker is then made good, a good one excellent, an excellent one extraordinary.
Vivian Gornick
Image
I hated being Mrs. from the first second each time. I didn't know why. All I knew was how uncomfortable it felt. I hated being one half of a couple, without understanding that it wasn't the husband or the man I hated, it was situation, the identity.
Vivian Gornick
Image
Papa's love did indeed have wondrous properties: it not only compensated for her boredom and anxiety, it was the cause of her boredom and anxiety.
Vivian Gornick
Image
To do science today is to experience a dimension unique in contemporary working lives the work promises something incomparable: the sense of living both personally and historically. That is why science now draws to itself all kinds of people - charlatans, mediocrities, geniuses - everyone who wants to touch the flame, feel alive to the time.
Vivian Gornick
Image
Research is the live heart of the scientific life ... Greatness of position, respect for past accomplishments, the Nobel Prize itself -- none of these can compensate for the loss of vitality only research provides.
Vivian Gornick
Image
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
Image
They say writers sell everybody out. What can you do? You know only the people you know.
Vivian Gornick
Image
Love can't be a metaphor anymore. If you try to make literature out of it, it doesn't work.
Vivian Gornick
Image
Feminism gave me a way to see myself in culture, in society, in history, and that was very important.
Vivian Gornick
Image
The difference between me in my work and the me who is here in front of you is that on the page I create a consistency, a voice that must sound really reliable whereas in person I am free - obviously! - to sound every which way.
Vivian Gornick
Image
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
Image
When I work I feel more alive than under any other circumstances. There's not an 'I love you' in the world that can match it. I feel safe, excited, at peace, erotic, centered. Nothing can touch me.
Vivian Gornick
Image
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
Image
Everyone longs for expressiveness. That's why love carries so much weight. Because so many lives are without other means of expressiveness.
Vivian Gornick