The fury of words

I was lying on the grass ... reading William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. ... Suddenly in the middle of a passage, the power of the words rose up and whacked me on the forehead. I felt the earth move as if a huge safe were being swiveled open and afterwards felt flushed and stunned as you are after sex. I'd had this reaction before—to other books, and to music and painting, but this time as I stared at the light—green blades of grass in front of me, vibrating, I was aware that it was the writer who had done something to me. And I thought, I'd like to do that to someone back.

--Susan Minot, “A Real-Life Education,” in The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work, p. 50.

The double life of the writer

I wrote out of desperation. In the great turmoil and gloom and euphoria of adolescence, I found there was nowhere to express the chaos of emotions I was feeling, nowhere but in words. I began to rely so much on writing that I was living a double life—one in the world and one on the page. The one on the page was more intense, more satisfying and for a long time much more real.

--Susan Minot, “A Real-Life Education,” in The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work, p. 50.