One of my fears is not writing. I don't know how to do anything else.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a deep anxiety about not being able to write, highlighting the personal significance of writing in one's life.
Paul Theroux's quote reflects a profound connection between the individual and their craft, emphasizing that writing is not just a skill but an integral part of identity. The fear of not being able to write suggests a vulnerability and a sense of loss, as it indicates that the speaker feels they lack other means of self-expression or fulfillment.
In practice
During a writing workshop, when discussing the importance of writing in one's life.
Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? βShe drove me to my practice at four in the morning,β etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.
I'm not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there's still a great green heart where there's possibility. There's hope in the wilderness.
I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.
When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.
Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.
The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.
It is shameful that dancing should renounce the empire it might assert over the mind and only endeavor to please the sight.
What I hate about kitchen-sink dramas is [this idea] that the set is real, therefore you're going to be seeing truth. You have to earn truth. Truth can't be a part of the fact that people appear to talk that way and live in that room. You're looking for the poetry in something, and I don't mean poetry in the fancy sense. Naturalism believes by just replicating a thing you give the truth, rather than earning the truth.
Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.
I can't read fiction without visualizing every scene. The result is it becomes a series of pictures rather than a book.
The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.
People find it hard to get their heads around nominating a computer-generated character, but every time you see Gollum on the screen, that's me who is acting up there - even if it is behind a mass of pixels - and it's my voice you hear.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.