Sylvia Plath - Writing Quotes

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Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.

Sylvia Plath

For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

Sylvia Plath

I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web.

Sylvia Plath

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

Sylvia Plath

Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing.

Sylvia Plath

Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing- singing, laughing, learning.

Sylvia Plath

You ask me why I spend my life writing?
Do I find entertainment?
Is it worthwhile?
Above all, does it pay?
If not, then, is there a reason?
I write only because
There is a voice within me
That will not be still.

Sylvia Plath

* To know a lot of people I love pieces of, and to want to synthesize those pieces in me somehow, be it by painting or writing. * To know that millions of others are unhappy and that life is a gentleman's agreement to grin and paint your face gay so others will feel they are silly to be unhappy, and try to catch the contagion of joy, while inside so many are dying of bitterness and unfulfillment…

Sylvia Plath

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

Sylvia Plath

The thing about writing is not to talk, but to do it; no matter how bad or even mediocre it is, the process and production is the thing, not the sitting and theorizing about how one should write ideally, or how well one could write if one really wanted to or had the time.

Sylvia Plath

I feel terribly vulnerable and 'not-myself' when I'm not writing.

Sylvia Plath

Why am I obsessed with the idea I can justify myself by getting manuscripts published? Is it an escape-an excuse for any social failure-so I can say "No, I don't go out for many extracurricular activities, but I spend a lot of time writing."

Sylvia Plath

I've got to have something. I want to stop it all, the whole monumental grotesque joke, before it's too late. But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.

Sylvia Plath