Katia N’s Reviews > Too Much of Life > Status Update

I think every writer is a born actor. In first place, the writer takes on the role of themselves and really inhabits the part. A writer is someone who tires easily, and ends up feeling slightly bored with herself, since her intimate contact with herself is, of necessity, too prolonged.

Knowing how to forget evil is another way of remembering. (Saber olvidar lo malo es tener memoria). A Spanish proverb.

People who don’t understand life think it’s just a series of things that happen. Those same people adore Van Gogh because he cut off his ear; Toulouse-Lautrec because he was a dwarf; Rembrandt because he starved to death; James Dean because he died in a car accident; Marilyn Monroe because she killed herself. Such people believe in posterity because they think they are posterity. Well then: I say stuff posterity.

I don’t like it when people say I have an affinity with Virginia Woolf (I only read her after writing my first book): the reason is that I do not want to forgive her for committing suicide. Our horrible duty is to keep going to the end. And not to rely on anyone. Live your own reality. Discover the truth. And in order to suffer less, numb yourself slightly.

I can say as Julio Cortázar did: pull the bow as taut as you can while you’re writing, then release the arrow and go and enjoy a bottle of wine with your friends. The arrow will fly through the air and will either hit or miss the target: only a fool would try to alter its trajectory or run after it to help it along a little, with his or her eyes on eternity and international fame.

What saves us from loneliness is the loneliness of each and every other person. Sometimes, when two people are together, even if they talk, what they are silently communicating to each other is the feeling of loneliness.

I went to see a movie, I didn’t understand a thing, but I felt everything. Will I go and see it again? I don’t know, this time I might not be in a state of well-being, I don’t want to risk it, I might suddenly understand and not feel.

I write at typewriter speed and, when I look at what I’ve written, I realize that I’ve revealed a certain part of me. I think that even if I wrote about the problem of coffee overproduction in Brazil, I would still end up being personal. …I’m consoled by something Fernando Pessoa wrote, and which I read somewhere: “Speaking is the simplest way of making ourselves unknown.”

Writing saves the imprisoned soul, it saves the person who feels useless, it saves each day we live through and can only understand if we write about it. Writing is trying to understand, it’s trying to reproduce the unreproducible, it’s feeling to the deepest depths an emotion that would otherwise remain vague and suffocating. Writing is also bestowing a blessing on a life that was not blessed.

God is quite right not to give us this state of grace very often. If he did, we might pass over permanently into the other side of life, which is also real, but then no one would ever understand us again. We would lose our shared language.