Marguerite Duras, exceprts from the essay "Writing"

The only judgement Raymond Queneau ever pronounced [on her writing] was this sentence: "Don't do anything but write."

Writing was the only thing that populated my life and made it magic. I did it. Writing never left me.

To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome. I believe that the person who writes does not have any ideas for a book, that her hands are empty, her head is empty, and that all she knows of this adventure, this book, is dry, naked writing, without a future, without echo, distant, with only its elementary golden rules: spelling, meaning.

This is what makes writing wild. One returns to a savage state from before life itself. And one can always recognize it: it's the savageness of forests, as ancient as time. It is the fear of everything, distinct an inseparable from life itself. One becomes relentless. One cannot write without bodily strength. One must be stronger than oneself to approach writing; one must be stronger than what one is writing.

A writer is an odd thing. He's a contradiction, he makes no sense. Writing also means not speaking. Keeping silent. Screaming without sound. A writer is often quite restful; she listens a lot. She doesn't speak much because it's impossible to speak to someone about a book one has written, and especially about a book one is writing. It's impossible.... Because a book is the unknown, it's the night, it's closed off, and that's that. It's the book that advances, grows, advances in directions one thought one had explored; that advances toward its own fate and the fate of its author, who is annihilated by its publication; her separation from it, the dream book, like the last-born child, always the best loved.

I think that what I blame books for, in general, is that they are not free. One can see it in the writing: they are fabricated, organized, regulated; one could say they conform. A function of the revision that the writer often wants to impose on himself. At that moment, the writer becomes his own cop. Bt being concerned with good form, in other words the most banal form, the clearest and most inoffensive. There are still dead generations that produce prim books. Even young people: charming books, without extension, without darkness. Without silence. In other words, without a true author. Books for daytime, for whiling away the hours, for travelling. But not books that become embedded in one's thoughts and toll the black mourning for all life, the commonplace of every thought.

Every book, like every writer, has a difficult, unavoidable passage. And one must consciously decide to leave this mistake in the book for it to remain a true book, not a lie.

I often find others' books "clean," but often as if they derive from a classicism that takes no chances. Inevitable would probably be the word. I don't know.

Personally, I'm like everyone else. I don't believe anyone ever turned around to look at me in the street. I am banality itself. The triumph of banality.

We never throw out flowers in this house. It's a habit, not a rule. Never, not even dead ones; we leave them there. There are some rose petals that have been in a jar for forty years. They are still very pink. Dry and pink.

It's the unknown in oneself, one's head, one's body. Writing is not even a reflection, but a kind of faculty one has, that exists to one side of oneself, parallel to oneself: another person who appears and comes forward, invisible, gifted with thought and anger...

If one had any idea what one was going to write, before writing, one would never write. It wouldn't be worth it anymore.