"I once said that writing is a curse. I can't remember why exactly I said that, and I meant it too. Now I say it again: it is a curse, but a curse that saves.
It's a curse, constraining you, dragging you along in its wake like some terrible addiction from which it's almost impossible to free yourself, because nothing can replace it. And it is also a salvation.
It saves the imprisoned soul, it saves the person who feels useless, it saves each day we live through and can only understand if we write about it. Writing is trying to understand, it's trying to reproduce the unreproducible, it's feeling to the deepest depths an emotion that would otherwise remain vague and suffocating. Writing is also bestowing a blessing on a life that was not blessed.
What a shame that I can only write when "the thing" spontaneously arrives. I am thus at the mercy of time. And between one bout of real writing and another, whole years can pass."
— Clarice Lispector and Margaret Jull Costa, Too Much of Life