Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Cormier

There is something almost ominous in how casual Cormier makes compulsion sound. “I can’t remember a time” is the kind of phrase people use about childhood smells or first loves; he uses it for the itch to write, as if the urge predates choice. The sentence doesn’t glamorize craft. It frames writing as a permanent condition, a low-level fever that never breaks.

The real engine here is the modest verb “trying.” Not “writing,” not “publishing,” not even “finishing” - trying. That word admits friction: the stubborn mismatch between what’s in your head and what language can hold. It’s also an ethical tell. Cormier’s novels, especially his young-adult classics, are famous for refusing neat moral closure. “Trying” fits a writer who distrusts easy answers and treats narrative as an ongoing interrogation rather than a product.

“Get something down on paper” sounds like a reporter’s habit as much as a novelist’s, and that’s part of the context. Cormier spent years in journalism; he learned that meaning is made in the act of pinning slippery reality to a page before it escapes. In the subtext, writing becomes less self-expression than survival: a way of controlling dread, recording what adults won’t say, giving shape to the pressure under everyday life.

The line doubles as a quiet mission statement. If you can’t remember a time you weren’t doing it, you’re not chasing inspiration. You’re building a life around the need to witness - even when what you witness is unsettling.