Cixous On Writing Quotes & Sayings

Being a dancer and a singer gave me some advantage with regards to having a stage presence. I always take my timing from the audience because they are half of my act. — Rita Rudner

Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable. — Helene Cixous

But I may also be afraid.
I am afraid.
I have already read it. And, not to lie to you, I liked it. But I am afraid. I am not afraid of you, Fidelia, Sania, Ania. I am afraid of you.
(I put all this in my separate notebook. My doubtbook.) — Helene Cixous

Love can end. It isn't permanent by nature, whatever the weavers of fairy tales want to suggest. Forever takes hard work, and is destroyed by lies. — Christine Amsden

Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies - for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text - as into the world and into history - by her own movement. — Helene Cixous

I ask of writing what I ask of desire: that it have no relation to the logic which puts desire on the side of possession, of acquisition, or even of that consumption-consummation which, when pushed to its limits with such exultation, links (false) consciousness with death — Helene Cixous

And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great-that is for "great men"; and it's "silly."
Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty-so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time. — Helene Cixous

The Universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the Universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the Universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything. — Thomas Berry

I hope to see London once ere I die. — William Shakespeare

And I was afraid. She frightens me because she can knock me down with a word. Because she does not know that writing is walking on a dizzying silence setting one word after the other on emptiness. Writing is miraculous and terrifying like the flight of a bird who has no wings but flings itself out and only gets wings by flying. — Helene Cixous

All that because Promethea is a woman? All this uproar, this trembling, this resistance?
Yes. No. Y-Yes ... Naynayno. Whynoyes.
Yes, Promethea is a woman.
Yes, but "because is a woman," that is not important.
But no it precisely its not being important that is so important. — Helene Cixous

When I write, it's everything that we don't know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking. — Helene Cixous

Everyone knows that a place exists which is not economically or politically indebted to all the vileness and compromise. That is not obliged to reproduce the system. That is writing. If there is a somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds. — Helene Cixous

Meditation needs no results. Meditation can have itself as an end, I meditate without words and on nothingness. What tangles my life is writing. — Helene Cixous

I would touch its walls with my fingers and its ceilings with my looks, I would invoke the powers of writing, I would bathe my soul in the rivers of unknown thoughts that genius unrolls when surrounded by the song of all the books its heart receives the marvelous measures of its own speech ... — Helene Cixous

By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display - the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time.
Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth. — Helene Cixous

He's Wayne Rooney - a good character and a lively character,He's been very helpful and understanding and has certainly made me feel welcome at international level and on club duty. He's a fantastic player and you can only learn from him. It's great to have him around. — Phil Jones

I think it's probably better to make a region your own, and then maybe you can go somewhere else, but a lot of great writers have stuck to one region. — Tom Barbash

The Official was bending over his desk, staring at the sergeant.
"May I ask you a question?"
"Yes."
"Have you ever thought you were Christ?"
"I can't say that I have. But I have considered that God was good to me to let me find what I was looking for, if that's what you mean. — Ray Bradbury

Those I love go in the direction of what they call the last hour - what Clarice Lispector calls, "the hour of the star," "the hour of relinquishing all the lies that have helped us live.
Writing or saying the truth is equivalent to death, since we cannot tell the truth. It is forbidden because it hurts everyone. We never say the truth, we must lie, mostly as a result of our two needs: our need for love and cowardice. — Helene Cixous

Writing, in its noblest function, is the attempt to unerase, to unearth, to find the primitive picture again, ours, the one that frightens us. — Helene Cixous

Throughout the Zelda series I've always tried to make players feel like they are in a kind of miniature garden. So, this time also, my challenge was how to make people feel comfortable and sometimes very scared at the same time. That is the big challenge. — Shigeru Miyamoto

The writer is a secret criminal. How? First because writing tries to undertake the journey toward strange sources of art that are foreign to us. "The thing" does not happen here, it happens somewhere else, in a strange and foreign country. The writer has a foreign origin; we do not know the particular nature of these foreigners, but we feel they feel there is an appeal, that someone is calling them back. — Helene Cixous

Other-Love is writing's first name. — Helene Cixous

This is what writing is: I one language, I another language, and between the two, the line that makes them vibrate; writing forms a passageway between two shores. — Helene Cixous

To fly/steal is woman's gesture, to steal into language to make it fly. — Helene Cixous

For a week she has been tormented, she burns to write something, gentle warmth emanates from her whole body, but still nothing comes of it. Besides, at the same time she is also busy burning old books, manuals, professional papers, theoretical volumes
because they keep her from doing the one thing that now seems urgent and right to her: shouting her loud hymn of ecstatic pleasure, breaching the tide of the old tongue's hard blare. — Helene Cixous

We should write as we dream; we should even try and write, we should all do it for ourselves, it's very healthy, because it's the only place where we never lie. At night we don't lie. Now if we think that our whole lives are built on lying-they are strange buildings-we should try and write as our dreams teach us; shamelessly, fearlessly, and by facing what is inside very human being-sheer violence, disgust, terror, shit, invention, poetry. In our dreams we are criminals; we kill, and we kill with a lot of enjoyment. But we are also the happiest people on earth; we make love as we never make love in life. — Helene Cixous

I couldn't believe a man had written this! Ryker had a way with words and the way with words and the way my emotions got twisted in them was a gift only a true writer possessed. — Sarah Brocious

If you told me today our being together would result in heartbreak I would still choose to be with you because I believe that truly living life is in the experiences not the outcomes. — Kathryn Perez

Life is also, as George Carlin taught us, a zero-sum game. We all lose in the end. We all die screaming. If that's the case, we might as well make for ourselves a paradise in this world. Make yourself happy and comfortable as often as you can, because sooner or later, the infinite hands you a bill for all these goods and services. What — Kevin Smith

Writing is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me. — Helene Cixous

The only book that is worth writing is the one we don't have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed — Helene Cixous

I will talk about truth again, without which (without the word truth, without the mystery truth) there would be no writing. It is what writing wants. But it "(the truth)" is totally down below and a long way off. And all the people I love and whom I have mentioned are beings who are bent on directing their writing toward this truth-over-there, with unbelievable labor; they are fighting against the elements and principally agains the innumerable immediate exterior and interior enemies. — Helene Cixous