Sylvia Plath Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

  Sylvia Plath

  Life, Sad, Writing

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.85, Anchor

• Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.

  Sylvia Plath

  Writing, Feminism, Classic

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.184, Anchor

• I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.

  Sylvia Plath

  Jealous, Writing, Thinking

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.20, Anchor

• The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

  Sylvia Plath

  Inspirational, Life, Beautiful

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.545, Anchor

• I write only because There is a voice within me That will not be still

  Sylvia Plath

  Writing, Voice, Stills

  Sylvia Plath (2011). “Letters Home”, p.56, Faber & Faber

• Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

  Sylvia Plath

  Success, Writing, Stink

  Barry Kyle, Sylvia Plath (1976). “Sylvia Plath, a Dramatic Portrait: Conceived and Adapted from Her Writings, by Barry Kyle”

• I always was interested in prose. As a teenager, I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and I find this more difficult in poetry.

  Sylvia Plath

  Teenager, Writing, Long

  Source: www.english.illinois.edu

• Why honey, don't you want to get dressed?" My mother took care never to tell me to do anything. She would only reason with me sweetly, like one intelligent, mature person with another. It's almost three in the afternoon." I'm writing a novel," I said. "I haven't got time to change into this and change into that.

  Sylvia Plath

  Mother, Writing, Intelligent

  Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.62, Hamilton Books

• I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

  Sylvia Plath

  Jobs, Writing, Expression

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.81, Anchor

• At this rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day. Then I knew what the problem was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?

  Sylvia Plath

  Girl, Baby, Writing

  sylvia plath (1971). “the bell jar”

• We stayed at home to write, to consolidate our outstretched selves.

  Sylvia Plath

  Life, Home, Writing

• Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.

  Sylvia Plath

  Inspirational, Writing, Important

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.10, Anchor

• Sure, I’m dramatic and sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental. But, in leisure years I could grow and choose my way. Now I am living on the edge. We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of energy, to teeter on the edge, looking over, looking down into the windy blackness and not being quite able to make out, through the yellow, stinking mist, just what lies below in the slime, in the oozing, vomit-streaked slime; and so I could go on, my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself.

  Sylvia Plath

  Lying, Writing, Years

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.32, Anchor

• So you got rid of your astonishment that someone could write so much more dynamically than you. You stopped cherishing your aloneness and poetic differentness to your delicately flat little bosom. You said: she's to good to forget. How about making her a friend and competitor — you could learn alot from her. So you'll try. So maybe she'll laugh in your face. So maybe she'll beat you hollow in the end. So anyhow, you'll try, and maybe, possibly, she can stand you. Here's hoping!

  Sylvia Plath

  Writing, Laughing, Trying

• I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web.

  Sylvia Plath

  Book, Writing, Angel

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.286, Anchor

• ... stop trying to get me to write about 'decent courageous people' -- read the Ladies' Home Journal for those! ... I believe in going through and facing the worst, not hiding from it.

  Sylvia Plath

  Believe, Home, Writing

  Sylvia Plath, Aurelia Schober Plath (1975). “Letters home: correspondence, 1950-1963”, HarperCollins Publishers

• Why am I obsessed with the idea I can justify myself by getting manuscripts published? Is it an escape-an excuse for any social failure-so I can say "No, I don't go out for many extracurricular activities, but I spend a lot of time writing."

  Sylvia Plath

  Writing, Ideas, Excuse

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.33, Anchor

• The thing about writing is not to talk, but to do it; no matter how bad or even mediocre it is, the process and production is the thing, not the sitting and theorizing about how one should write ideally, or how well one could write if one really wanted to or had the time.

  Sylvia Plath

  Writing, Sitting, Matter

  Sylvia Plath (2011). “Letters Home”, p.220, Faber & Faber

• You ask me why I spend my life writing? Do I find entertainment? Is it worthwhile? Above all, does it pay? If not, then, is there a reason?... I write only because there is a voice within me. That will not be still.

  Sylvia Plath

  Inspirational, Life, Beautiful

  Sylvia Plath (2011). “Letters Home”, p.56, Faber & Faber

• Very depressed today. Unable to write a thing. Menacing gods. I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness.

  Sylvia Plath

  Depression, Stars, Writing

  Sylvia Plath (2000). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962”, Anchor

• I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in.

  Sylvia Plath

  Writing, World

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.157, Anchor

• Can a selfish egocentric jealous and unimaginative female write a damn thing worthwhile?

  Sylvia Plath

  Jealousy, Selfish, Writing

  Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Frances Monson McCullough (1991). “The journals of Sylvia Plath”

• Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

  Sylvia Plath

  Summer, Writing, People

  Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.62, Hamilton Books

• Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing- singing, laughing, learning.

  Sylvia Plath

  Running, Dream, Writing

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.118, Anchor

• Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled 'Rain' pour in from across the nation.

  Sylvia Plath

  Rain, Writing, August

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.9, Anchor

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