Selection of Writings

(I also lead creative writing workshops on and offline, more info here)

  • “You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.”

    Doris Lessing

  • “A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls...and their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”

    Ursula K le Guin

  • “Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

    Franz Kafka

  • "Words should not seek to please, to hide the wounds in our bodies, or the shameful moments in our lives. They may hurt, give us pain, but they can also provoke us to question what we have accepted for thousands of years."

    Nawal El Saadawi

  • "The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”

    Margaret Atwood

  • “Why shouldn't we, so generally addicted to the gigantic, at last have some small works of art, some short poems, short pieces of music…some intimate, low-voiced, and delicate things in our mostly huge and roaring, glaring world?”

    - Elizabeth Bishop