alec burns

“[The introverted thinking type]… tends to vanish behind a cloud of misunderstanding… Although he will shrink from no danger in building up his world of ideas, and never shrinks from thinking a thought because it might prove to be dangerous, subversive, heretical, or wounding to other people’s feelings, he is none the less beset by the greatest... See more

“If I spend weeks and months avoiding my typewriter—and I do, sharpening pencils, trying to avoid going where I know I’ve got to go—then one has got to use this to learn humility. After all, there is a kind of saving egotism too, a cruel and dangerous but also saving egotism, about the artist’s condition, which is this: I know that if I survive it,... See more

is that all you need to do to be a writer is to write sincerely about yourself and all you see. to run around naked, stripped of all that is pretty and polished and put on display your heart for us passersby to examine. all you need is a pen, and yourself.

as a writer, even as a child, long before what i wrote began to be published i developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs - joan didion

I realized this year that what stays with me from books is never plot, always voice. Voice as ongoing observations of the living world and the relationships that bind us together within it. Voice as autonomy. For a long time I didn’t really know how to write in my own “voice.” I had to learn I could just say the thing I felt