Patricia Duncker

“You write your first novel with the desperation of the damned. You're afraid that you'll never write anything else, ever again.”

“We articulate our fears, like children in the dark, giving them names in order to tame them.”

“Freedom: both so priceless and so expensive.”

“The love between writer and a reader is never celebrated. It can never be proved to exist. But he was the man I loved most. He was the reader for whom I wrote.That’s what my writing was. Messages in bottles.”

“The cats are asleep at the end of my bed and all around me, the thundery silence of L'Escarènere, caught at last in the rising flood of warm air, carrying the sand from the south. The Alps are folded above in the flickering light. And on the desk in the room beneath lies the writing which insists that the only escape is through the absolute destruction of everything you have ever known, loved, cared for, believed in, even the shell of yourself must be discarded with contempt; for freedom costs no less than everything, including your generosity, self-respect, integrity, tenderness - is that really what i wanted to say? It's what I have said. Worse still, I have pointed out the sheer creative joy of this ferocious destructiveness and the liberating wonder of violence. And these are dangerous messages for which I am no longer responsible.”

“The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated.”