Writing

“Por donde me pareció darle nombre de Historia natural y moral de las Indias, abrazando con este intento ambas cosas.”

“As a writer, my work demands this liberation if I am to see more clearly, to understand more wholly.”

“I never feel that I have to be true to history: I have to be true to my story.”

“I believe there is something that can be passed between writers, between generations—that changes in time but not in essentials.”

“This time, I was telling my own story instead of creating characters in my head.”

“文以载道，儒者无不能言之。”

“I don’t sit down and write. That’s never been my style.”

“I found it impossible to write in the stanza form.”

““I suppose that every author’s ambition is to get his play produced before a London audience... It has been mine, and I have achieved it.””

“As a writer I just try to express an idea.”

“I began writing in rather chauvinistic times. Luckily, now, things are very different.”

“Ma découverte interesse toutes les nations, et c’est pour toutes les nations que je veux faire et mon histoire et mon apologie.”

“When I’m writing novels, reality and unreality just naturally get mixed together.”

“When you're writing a story, it often feels less like you're doing architecture and more like you're doing excavation—we're just unearthing it.”

“When you sit with your pen, every year of your life is right there, wired into the communication between your brain and your writing hand.”

“Our reporting should speak for itself.”

“The most important thing is that I'm writing in Irish Gaelic.”

“In the case of history what matters is its meaning; its medium is events, and its vehicle is literature.”