A Room of One's Own, III
Thursday, March 28, 2013
"When I was seven, I said to my mother, may I close the door? And she said yes, but why do you want to close the door? And I said because I want to think. And when I was eleven, I said to my mother, may I lock my door? And she said, yes, but why do you want to lock your door? And I said, because I want to write." - Dorothy West
"I can live a solitary life for months at a time, and it does me good, because I'm working. I just get up bright and early -- sometimes at five o'clock -- have my black coffee and go to work. In the days when I was taken up with everything else, I used to do a day's work, or housework or whatever I was doing, and then work at night. I worked when I could. But I prefer to get up very early in the morning and work. I don't want to speak to anybody or see anybody. Perfect silence. I work until the vein is out. There's something about the way you feel, you know when the well is dry, that you'll have to wait til tomorrow and it will be full up again." - Katherine Anne Porter
"What I love about my cabin -- what I always forget that I love until I open the door and step into it -- is the absolute quiet. Oh, not the dead silence of a studio. A silence so physical that you begin to gasp for air; and it's not the allegorical silence silence of an empty apartment, with its creaks and sniffles and traffic a dull roar below, and the neighbors' muffled treading overhead. No, this is the silence of the world: birds shifting weight on branches, the branches squeaking against other twigs, the deer hoosching through the woods....It's a silence where you can hear the blood in your chest, if you chose to listen." - Rita Dove
"Writing requires huge amounts of solitude. What I've done to soften the harshness of that choice is that I don't write all the time. I like to go out -- which includes traveling; I can't write when I travel. I like to talk. I like to listen. I like to look and to watch. Maybe I have Attention Surplus Disorder. The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention." - Susan Sontag
"When I get up in the morning, I always have the desire to sit down and write. And most of the days I do write something. But then I get telephone calls, and sometimes I have to write an article for The Foreward. And once in a while I have to write a review, and I am interviewed, and I am all the time interrupted. Somehow I manage to keep on writing. I don't have to run away. Some writers say they can only write if they go to a far island. They would go to the moon to write not to be disturbed. I think that being disturbed is a part of human life and sometimes it's useful to be disturbed because you interrupt your writing and while you rest, while you are busy with something else, your perspective changes or the horizon widens. All I can say about myself is that I have never really written in peace." - Isaac Bashevis Singer
"I feel that art has something to do with achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction." - Saul Bellow
The last word today comes from Ann Petry, who says:
"It doesn't much matter where I sit to write."
All of the photographs and quotes above come from The Writer's Desk, a beautiful little volume of black-and-white photographs featuring writers in their work spaces, by Jill Krementz. Krementz is a portrait photographer, photojournalist, and author based in New York City (and the wife of the late Kurt Vonnegut). The cropped images here don't do full justice to her work. The book's cover iimage is a portrait of Eudora Welty at her desk.