Paul Lisicky > Paul's Quotes

“Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve--hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve--not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.”
― Joy Williams

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself.”
― Robert Walser

“How then, in the time that followed, did I become someone I didn't know?”
― Paul Lisicky

“Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.”
― Mary Gaitskill