A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.
As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that... That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is.
They say every writer really just writes about one thing over and over. I guess my one thing is how the past impacts the present.
The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.
You can't undo the past... but you can certainly not repeat it.
Every kind of book I've written has been written in a different way. There has not been any set time for writing, any set way, I haven't re-invented the process every time but I almost have.
There's a practical problem about time and energy, and a more subtle problem of what it does to a writer's head, to continually analyze why they write, where it all comes from, where it's going to.
I don't think it's possible to separate out the strands of a writer's history, circumstances, life events, and that writer's themes.
I think that all writing is in search of lost time. I'm starting to realise that very clearly.