to understand. To love. For that we want. To know. By necessity. For money. By custom. To live other lives and revive itself. To testify. Fifty writers try to answer that uncomfortable question Some came to literature calling for the pleasure of reading and to emulate the authors they admired. Now create vital necessity, or just do it for money. Renowned authors reveal the reasons for devoting their lives to writing.
In the beginning was the Word ... San Juan takes it in his Gospel. The word that makes up the world, the name says it all. May not have been such, that before the word existed skies, seas, night, day, stars, sky. But nobody knew how to name, were nothing, absolutely nothing. So at the beginning was the Word, as well he wrote John. And that verb followed biblical epics of Homer, the weather and the power of the gods, love and war that tells the Iliad and then the madness of Don Quixote, then, the loneliness of Macondo.
may after episodes narrated as those do not need anything else. But the classics, who rode all the foundations of the temple, followed by more generations - "link in the unbroken chain of tradition", which alert Enrique Vila-Matas, some new questions for every age, new problems and, Therefore, new concepts, new words. Behind her lay a log writer. Why?
Why write? What name? Why count? To understand. To love and be loved. To know, to know. For fear, by necessity, for money. To survive, because not everyone can dance the tango, play good football. By custom, the custom to kill, living and reliving other lives own. To bear witness, because they do not know how to write well, admits John Banville. For read, suffered and looked face to face with death. Because the verb
causes disquiet in Nelida Pinon; because it is chosen as a love Amélie Nothomb adds. Being the masochist that you have inside, Wole Soyinka argues, for streams and rivers of the books read, has Fernando Iwasaki; as a form of existence, according to Elvira Lindo. "One way to live," says Vargas Llosa, to paraphrase Flaubert. To feel alive and dead, proclaims Fernando Royuela. As you breathe, released between interrogations Carlos Fuentes. Or to survive for that purpose, "the necessary death that I name each day, "testified Jorge Semprun.
Writing is pain and pleasure. As the story, as Aristotle's rhetoric is a weapon, we learn. beginning and end. First of all came the verb makes clear San Juan. So Kafka knew. But the Czech writer asks: "And in the end?". Perhaps silence, as interpreted by George Steiner about his work, with good sense, smelling the apocalypse of the European destruction.
As testimony also puts one in roles . It is written by the same reason that Anne Frank began to organize his journal. Or why the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, when he spent 17 months in the ranks of the Leningrad prison to see his son responded to a woman who recognized her and asked if he could describe what I do, I would. "Then," says Anna Requiem - a sort of smile slid across what had once been her face. " That was enough reason. The thrill of truth, justice record. For others perhaps apply to your present, so that was not repeated. But Anna Akhmatova
confessed also that he wrote to feel a bond with time. Also did for love, for fear of love, by tearing. In honor of the Muses, like Shakespeare, "that sweet tooth of the words", according to Steiner, in his sonnets: "My muse bites education language and silent while compiling / praise you wear glitter / and phrases that the other muses liman. A piece that ends with a declaration of intent and a response to the great subject of writing: "If others for those you respect / to me, so I think that is my point.
the beginning was the Word. But haughty Cervantes and Shakespeare, which equals the measure of God. For explored all delusions and passions His creatures. Why write? to emulate, nothing more. Could be. "To be like Espronceda" as loose Caballero Bonald. Write because you meditate, like Descartes, like Chesterton, whose work involves us in an endless paradox. To enter in the mazes and do not necessarily want to leave them, like Borges. "Because we're here, but we would like to be there," says Antonio Tabucchi. To emulate his childhood when the child Almudena Grandes amending the plan to the end he did not like. For re-invent stories of Indians, cowboys and Smurfs, says David Safier. Because when you do this, "Enjoyment is a word that falls short," says Ken Follet.
To fix the memory, a way to "bring forth memories and pictures," says Alvaro Pombo. To return to previous lives, to the readings and each has stumbled in his backpack, according to Arturo Perez-Reverte. As a solitary vice, described Hector Abad Faciolince. Because you do not feel well, "says Juan Jose Millas. For love or grief, says Gonzalo Hidalgo Bayal. Or because he liked the essays in school, as discovered by Antonio Muñoz Molina. And to this day.
The word is water and every story, the river that carries them. The writer is the one who dominates the current, as did Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Galdós, Clarín, Flaubert, Tolstoy, who followed in the footsteps of Homer's epic as anyone. Or the one that goes against the current, as Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Valle-Inclán. Undoubtedly, you have to deal with it, says Josep Pla in his Dictionary of Literature, "with temperament." Or the effort of knowing, in the manner of Montaigne and the great memoirists later eighteenth century. Between truth and exaggeration, but with talent like Casanova.
The game, the torture of the word, it is also legal. But that is more committed to the poets, as admitted Jaime Gil de Biedermann. For him, writing was "eroding the language in the way the language supports it." That is, the word abuse, whipping, strangling. But to resurrect it later, as the Gospel. Throughout history, the writer has seen Babel and helped to understand. But there was also a time in the twentieth century, which wiped out, he threw himself to the apocalypse, the Second World War. Enjoy in this new era. All reasons, all that occur to tell our story who should apply
Héctor Abad Faciolince
Because my brain communicates better with my hands than with his tongue. Because I hate less typing than talking. For a pleasant solitary vice. John Banville
write because I can not write. A reporter asked why Gore Vidal Myra Breckinridge had written, to which he replied: "'Why was not there". " It was a good response. Put something new in the world is a privilege not granted to many people.
Felipe Benítez Reyes
I do not know why I write, nor do I have much interest in knowing. In this case, I worry more about how to why. The question seems pointless, so that any possible answer would not be a tricky pirouette in a vacuum. Although, who knows, maybe write one for that: to get answers without the requirement of a previous question and, above all, to practice tricky stunts in a vacuum, which is a very fertile literary territory. John Boyne
write because the stories come into my mind and I refuse to leave until I write 26 letters on the keyboard and send them to a screen before my eyes. Writing by Charles Dickens. And George Orwell. And John Irving. And Colm Tóibín. I write because I love the feeling of having a book in my hands and a book in my head. I write because I love words. I write because I read. I write because I always want to know what happens next.
José Manuel Caballero Bonald
I started writing because I wanted to look like Espronceda. One day I found in my family home a biography of the poet and was fascinated by someone who died at 33 years and had seen a great adventure: founding a secret society, suffered persecution and imprisonment, he went into exile in Lisbon and London, he fought on the barricades in Paris , was a deputy lived love tough, fought heroically against absolutism, and so on. Well, since I could not emulate Espronceda unique in so many feats, I chose what I was more feasible: rebellious exercise and write poetry. Andrea Camilleri
write because it is always best to unload boxes at the central market. I write because I can not do otherwise. I write because I can then dedicate the books to my grandchildren. I write because it makes me remember all the people who I always wanted. I write because I like telling stories. I write because I like telling stories. I write because in the end I can take my beer. I write to give back everything I've read. Luisa Castro
Writing for me is a surrender. I write to find stories that I tell myself. I am owner of my stories, even then, are autonomous and more powerful than me. I do not identify with them, do not share their ideas or their world view. Occur in my head without my permission, and when the loose, it's because I have won. Lucia Etxebarria
That I want more. Because every time someone says, 'Your books have helped me a lot, please keep writing "gives me a reason. Because by placing characters in situations that can symbolically represent aspects of my life and make them go gracefully somehow saved me. Because I've always done, because it is natural to me, and because it is things I do best, besides drawing, cooking, making love and hold parties. I write for love, public money. For that reason, public or half of what I write. Umberto Eco
Because I like. Ken Follet
enjoy writing, but "enjoy" is a word that falls short. The act of writing I love. All part of the challenge to jinx my readers. My work absorbs me totally. Carlos Fuentes
Why stop?
Almudena Grandes
When I was little and read a book that I liked, I made up alone, for myself, the other end, then its author wanted to write. Even now, when I can not sleep, I tell stories, I think, the review, I describe in silence with eyes closed, until I fall asleep. Mark Haddon
Fiction, poetry, theater, painting, drawing, photography ... really does not matter. One day that I can not do something, however small, it seems a wasted day. Sometimes it can seem a blessing to be so, as certainly know what I do but often is painful, because knowing what you want is not the same as knowing how. Why write? The only answer is "because I can not do anything else." Gonzalo Hidalgo
Bayal
"For love, for grief," I once wrote. For fans, it is lean, necessity, perseverance and distraction. For pain, because only the pain and its many circumstances provide sufficient literary field. Focuses on the love relationship with language, that is, the more intense, more enjoyable and fun. Grief requires, however, the search for meaning, if you have any sense the misfortunes of mankind. Fernando Iwasaki
write because it is the most powerful act libertarian I know. I write because the spell of literature is explosive and I am excited to be an apprentice of those spells. I write because my parents and children light up every time someone tells them he has read something of mine. I write because storytelling is the oldest profession in the world. I write because I spend all my fiction as well, while women and keep writing, she'll know you still love. Use Lahoz
writing to reflect and think and ruminate on the life of characters always more interesting than mine. And enjoy the pleasure of fiction that is addictive and that, as reality has no limits. Writing course to combat boredom and a good time. For a writer to live, basically, is to write. I write to be at peace with myself, saying that Machado's "I live in peace with men and at war with my body." I write because touching and enduring, each novel is first. It is also fairly inexpensive. In short: I write because I learn, and so it sometimes seems that I'm studying. Donna Leon
At first wrote to see if he could. It turned out that writing a book was fun. And so now, after 20 years and 20 books, I do it because it's fun. The characters do what they tell you to do, the reality can be changed to suit my needs, if someone dies, I can resurrect the next day. I guess there is also an element of vanity. At a dinner, we all want to pay attention to our ideas, is not it? But good manners dictate that we share conversation with others. But in a book, our book, we writers can continue, blah, blah, blah, without stopping, and never have to interrupt to let anyone else speak. Elvira Lindo
writing since she was nine. From a very young began to pay me on the radio scripts, short stories and sketches. At age 31 I began to write books. I thought that writing was my calling until I realized it was something else. It is a skill but also a way of life. I could not live without writing. Everything I do at the end of the day, what I see and hear, which makes me wonder, joy or sorrow is material to be counted. And that attitude to life, to form part of the human comedy but also to be a spectator of it, this being outside and inside at the same time, helps me to assimilate in an enriching experience. I write every day. When not writing, I feel useless, so I've reached a radical conclusion: I will never quit. I can not do otherwise, would not know vivir de otra manera.
Alberto Manguel
Porque no sé bailar el tango, tocar un instrumento musical como la celesta o el glockenspiel, resolver problemas de matemáticas superiores, correr una maratón en Nueva York, trazar las órbitas de los planetas, escalar montañas, jugar al fútbol, jugar al rugby, excavar ruinas arqueológicas en Guatemala, descifrar códigos secretos, rezar como un monje tibetano, cruzar el Atlántico en solitario, hacer carpintería, construir una cabaña en Algonquin Park, conducir un avión a reacción, hacer surf, jugar a complejos videojuegos, resolver crucigramas, jugar al ajedrez, hacer costura, traducir del árabe y del Greek, perform the tea ceremony, butcher a hog, being a stockbroker in Hong Kong, orchid planting, harvesting barley, to belly dancing, skating, talking in sign language, recite the Koran by heart, act a theater, flying in an airship, a filmmaker and a film in black and white, absolutely realistic, Alice in Wonderland, pass myself off as a respectable banker and defraud thousands of people, enjoying a plate of tripe à la mode de Caen, making wine, be a doctor and travel to a place ravaged by war and dealing with people who have lost an arm, a leg, a house, a son, to organize a diplomatic mission solve the problem of the Middle East, save shipwrecked, spent thirty years studying Sanskrit paleography, restore Venetian paintings, being a goldsmith, turn somersaults with or without a net, a whistle, that why I write. Javier Marias
write to avoid head or being forced to wake up early. Also because there are not many who can do more things, and I prefer it and I enjoy more than translate or teach, I do know that apparently do. Or knew, are activities of the past. I also write for not owe almost anything to almost anyone or having to salute those who do not wish to greet. Because I think I better while I'm at the machine elsewhere and circumstance. I write fiction because fiction has the power to teach us what we do not know what is not given, as one character in the novel I just finished. And because the imagery is very helpful to understand what we're in, what is usually called "reality." What I do is write out of necessity. So quiet I could spend years without writing a line. But something has to take the time and some money must be won. I also write for it. Martin Luisgé
When I listen to a writer to explain the reasons for writing, I think I share those reasons. All. I feel like a compendium, as one of those hypochondriacs they find themselves all the symptoms you hear about. I write as psychological therapy, to order the world and understand it, to live lives that I could not live. But recently, reading Pamuk's speech at the Swedish Academy when he received the Nobel, I found a reason I had never heard well made and I feel wonderful, "I write because it may well understand why I am so, so angry with you, with all the world. "
Luis Mateo Díez
write to disguise the inability to do anything else. I write not only entertains, it also excites me and makes me feel ownership of something that is contrary to my existence to a certain inclination of futility. The days when I am satisfied with what I write I have the conviction not to have wasted your time. Eduardo
Mendicutti
I too, like Vargas Llosa, tell me lots of times the only thing I do is write. Maybe that's why eventually giving me the Nobel. For everything else, I'm convinced I'm a mess: to lay bricks, to grow tomatoes, to impose order, to run on foot or by bicycle, even if doped, to convict criminals-with what I like some criminals-without breaking my heart, without becoming infected or to defend ... Admittedly, since 30 years ago, I'm pretty good as general secretary of an employers' consulting firms, but with something I have to redeem myself. Of course, as some critics and colleagues, writing may also be a calamity, but that have not yet come to believe. Eduardo Mendoza
honestly do not know. Not a pretty answer, but it's the closest to the truth. Ricardo Menéndez
Salmon
write for dissatisfaction. If satisfied, I would simply "living life", rather than trying to understand through writing. Of course trying to understand, that is, to write, I realize that in fact life is incomprehensible. This generates a new dissatisfaction, verify that the attempt to understand life through literature that illuminates only thing is the inability to achieve that understanding. But then something strange happens, and that the failure to discover the impossibility moves me, admires and encourages to write more and more.
Juan Jose Millas
write for the same reasons that I read, because I do not feel well. Rosa Montero
write because I can not stop the constant flood of images that cross my head, and some of those images so excited I feel the urgent need share. I write to have something to think about when in the dark loneliness of the half-sleep at night, in bed before sleep, I assailed the fears and anxieties. While I'm writing because I am so full of life that my death does not exist: as I write, I am untouchable and eternal. And above all, I write to try to give the evil and pain a sense that I actually have not.
Luis Muñoz
I think I can distinguish reasons of a general and particular reasons. Between individuals: to give shape to a particular emotion, to make him a household word to one of those thoughts that you think might be saviors, to be vulnerable to contagion from another poem believe me feel wonderful and I can answer that, go talk to him or any of its loose ends. Among general, wanting to feel my time, the rabid present, in language, by being in love with the ability of words to tell the truth again, for the feeling of freedom that produces, by shaping beings reports: embryos voices, feelings, sensations, ideas ...
Antonio Muñoz Molina
I think I never thought much about why I write, except when I have asked that question and I had to improvise a response to sound convincing. I write, mostly because I love it, and I liked almost since I have memories. I liked making up stories, writing and drawing as a child. I liked writing essays in school. Then I started reading novels of adventure and I learned that all had an author who used to be Jules Verne, for the first time I thought practicing that craft. Then I fell in love to read poetry and I started writing imitation poems, always very bad. When I had a typewriter in the evenings I would improvise whatever, for the pure pleasure of hitting the keys, diaries, poems, plays. I write for fun and because I make my living writing. Sometimes I really enjoy and others would rather be doing anything else. But sometimes when I began to write against my will and almost by force, I found things that I otherwise would not have occurred. I also write for taking away the bad conscience of not writing, or to have the relief of having done. I can not imagine not running, at least for long periods, but I can not imagine not writing. In the background is a vice, a daily habit, or a way of being in the world, and have love for reading or music. Julia Navarro
For me, writing is an opportunity to live other lives, but also engage, although sometimes be involved with the role of entertainment. Andrés Neuman
write because
child felt that writing was a form of curiosity and ignorance. I write because childhood is an attitude. I write because I do not know, and do not know why I write. I write because the only way I can think of. Amélie Nothomb
I wonder why I chose writing. I did not choose. It's like falling in love. We know it's not a good idea and no one knows how he got there, but at least have to try. He devotes all energy, all thoughts, all the time. Writing is an act and like love, is something that is done. It is not known due to its use, so they invented because it necessarily must find a way to make a means to achieve it.
Arturo Perez-Reverte
write because I am 25 years professional novelist, and live it. It's my job. Like others in the office spend eight hours a day, I will step in my library, surrounded by books and notebooks, imagining stories that explain the world as I see it, and bringing them to paper keystroke. I try to do the most disciplined and effective manner. As for handling the matter, each written in what is, I suppose. With what he has in the eyes and memory. Many things do not need to invent them: I simply remember. I was a late writer to 35 years because I was busy living, reading, kicking the world, books and life. Now, so I threw in a backpack during those years, I narrate my own stories. Rewrite the books that I loved the light of life I lived. Nobody has told me that story. Nelida Pinon
I write because the name causes me anxiety, sharpens thousand instruments of life. And because, to tell, I depend on my belief in mortality. With the belief that a story well told snatch me tears. Especially when, in the heady narrative mentions unrequited love, bridal hurtful, mixed feelings, stripped of logic. Write, in conclusion, to win a pass to wander in the human labyrinth. Alvaro Pombo
I think of the little cemetery in London, about ten minutes walk from Paddington Green, where he stole a dog ugly, cement, from the grave of a woman buried there. Coming to Madrid, I left that dog to its fate. Write this, is it write or not? It is, of course, a way to bring up memories and images than the normal way: a way prefabricated, you want to cause an indelible effect at least in my soul and then in a reader or a million, if possible. It is also an attempt to express the self, the God in the light of being-there that I was then, at the edge of nowhere. Benjamin Prado
I write to amuse, to entertain, to learn, to teach them to be true that "writing is to dream and others to remember to wake up", so I will not forget, lest we shut up and first because there might not. Soledad
Puértolas
The joys of life overwhelm you. The pain and loss than you and sink. Boredom and monotony can be killers. When I write, I'm out of that reality. I entered another where it is possible to find meaning even glimpse. The loneliness that so often has become unbearable, it is lightweight and desirable. The perfect state. There are goals, humanity senses. To be laughter, great gift. Santiago Roncagliolo
should say I write because I can not do anything else, but I'll try a more profound: I think the reality has no meaning. Things happen around you in an erratic manner, often contradictory, and one day you die. The things you thought were no longer certain of one point to another. In contrast, the novels have a beginning, middle and end. The characters go to some place, the glory, self-destruction or nothing, and their actions have consequences in this way. I write stories to create something that makes sense. Fernando
Royuela
write to seduce, to subvert, to feel alive and dead, to mourn, loving and cursing. I write not to have to put up with me, to deny the world, to escape. I write because I feel like it and I can afford. David Safier
Do you remember as a kid and playing, inventing wild stories with figurines of Indians, cowboys or Smurfs? Or just in the bathtub imagining that he was the captain of a pirate ship in search of a treasure in the midst of the storm? Do you remember how you felt when playing with other children living on the street and doing incredible adventures of explorers, hunters or secret agents battling dinosaurs, monsters or supermalos who wanted to destroy the Earth with death rays? Well, all that is what I do yet. Playing with my imagination. Every day of my life. And I'll keep doing it until I die. Or I go mad. Jorge Semprun
If I knew I might not write. I mean, if I knew for sure if every moment could be restricted to proclaim without hesitation, why I write, and what, for who, if so, may not write. So I write, to some extent, to find answers to why. Writing is not a reflex, not a natural function. Not written as they eat or love. Not exhausted by the fact to write the portentous, or painful, or one or the other, a miracle of writing. Not limited, to write, writing endless desire. Perhaps because it is the best way to survive. Why write? Perhaps to survive death, the necessary death that names me every day. Wole Soyinka
several years ago, I participated in this same experience with the French newspaper Libération. On that occasion said, "I guess that's the masochist in me be me." Since then, I had no reason to change my answer.
Antonio Tabucchi
rather ask the question this way: Why write? Long ago, when I was young, I listened to Samuel Beckett answered: "I have no other." The possible answers are all plausible but the question mark. "We write because we fear death? Why are we afraid to live, because we have nostalgia for childhood, because the last time he ran faster or because we want to stop? Do you write for because of nostalgic longing, regret? Why we would have done one thing and did not or because we should have done something we did? Why are we here and we want to be there and if we were there we would have been better to stay here? As I said Baudelaire, life is a hospital where every patient wants to change the bed. You think it would heal faster if it was next to the window and another thought it was better with the heat. Andrés
Trapiello
natural thing is to speak, even sing, but not write. Put the words written in a book is, Unamuno said, a "tragedy of the soul, and perhaps be written by a fear of being alone with their pain, as if writing were a choice, not a poison. I feel so well. Uribe Kirmen
In November 2007 I was fortunate to attend as guest writer to creative writing class Anthony McCann, the CalArts Los Angeles. Anthony told me that the best of each promotion are acquired by large producers to work as a writer of TV series. Get rich. The "worst", by contrast, are dedicated to poetry. I love being alone and writing. "A lonely impulse of delight" leads me to write, as Yeats said in his poem "An Irish Airman foresees his death." I enjoy almost as much as the "worst" of CalArts, which lay on the lawn of the campus with a book in his hands, looked up to see the clouds pass. I, on the kind of Anthony, would undoubtedly be the group of poets.
Mario Vargas Llosa
write because
child learned to read and gave me much pleasure reading, made me so rich life experiences, transformed my life in a wonderful way I guess my literary vocation was as a perspiration, giving off the great happiness that I was reading . In some ways writing has been like the back or the essential complement to this reading, which for me remains the ultimate experience, the richer the more it helps me to face any adversity or frustration. On the other hand, writing, which at first is an activity that you incorporate into your life with others, exercise is becoming the way you live in the central activity, which organizes absolutely your life. Flaubert's famous dictum that whenever I quote: "Writing is a way of life." In my case was exactly that. It has become the center of everything I do, so do not conceive a life without the writing and, of course, without its complement indispensable reading.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
write because it irritates me and it saddens me the mess in the world and discovered long ago that in good fiction the world has an order or disorder has an effect. I write because my understanding is limited and I can understand only what comes in words. I write, therefore, because I do not understand or because I do not know: "write what you know" seems to me more advice idiot of the world, because it is written precisely to know. Manuel Vicent
If this question is I had made many years ago, when I started writing, my answer would have been more romantic, more literary, more stupid. Probably would have said he wrote to create a world in my image, to read the book that was not in my library, not to kill, to love a girl, to influence society or perhaps cynically because it did not for anything else or even to fix a plug. Not to mention that the trade has vanity and narcissism, at this stage of the writing because I believe profession is a job I like, that sometimes I get good and some bad, but in any case the literature and is part of the same life force that helps me to feel comfortable in this world yet, but expect much from their result.
Enrique Vila-Matas
Ah, I see again the old and treacherous question. But you might also wonder why I just made a knot in my shoes, and why I have not contented with a knot, for that matter, would have served me well. At some distant time, an ancestor made the first bow. We are not more than their imitators, a link in the unbroken chain of tradition. So who would to ask why I write is that ancestor, asking why he wanted to go beyond the knot.
Juan Eduardo Zúñiga
The garden looks aged with the cold of November and the ground is covered with fallen leaves of an acacia. I keep looking at it from the window, I'm alone in the empty room where I have toys and stories, the walls covered with pins two sheets relating to a foreign country and abroad is the author of a book that lame, and I learn your Name: Michel Zevaco. Leo the end of the second chapter: a man seeking non-stop in a chest full of jewels and finds it more important to him. I'm surprised that more " valuable jewels? I have next to a notebook and pencil, write without thinking: "He wanted something from the jewelry ..." and keep writing, and until today I
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