"(What’s the sensation of writing?) HC: A sense of power and surprise when it’s going well. But always obsessive hope, as you pace an almost familiar terrain. (Surprise at what?) HC: At what can happen under your hand. When the whole becomes greater than the parts. But the real surprise is afterward. When I see that the book has made its own rules. Each one in the end makes its own form."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hortense_Calisher
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Hortense Calisher
Hortense Calisher (December 20, 1911 – January 13, 2009) was an American novelist.
25 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Hortense Calisher →
Related Quotes
"what I have written—and how I came to write it—is most powerfully what I am."
"out in what I knew damn well was the real world—of literature and everything else—my agony was how to begin. (How do …"
"I think such middle-class backgrounds, where the bourgeois only sniffs at art or intellect, often produce artists. A …"
"I don’t think artists can compete—except as to money and prizes, and, of course, status. Which may be temporary. But …"
"I couldn’t write those first stories about them until they were all dead. That’s when I began. (It was an unusual fam…"
"As for complication—or complexity—it excites me."
"(You graduated when you were seventeen, and shortly left the household to work and live on your own. Yet you weren’t …"
"I know by now that I don’t care to be an accepted habitué of any one world. That’s part of being a writer too. Wantin…"
"That’s the wonder of the English language. That its words can alternate between rough and soft, harsh and sweet. And,…"
"A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose."