"Writing only leads to more writing"
About this Quote
Writing is often sold as catharsis: get it out, close the notebook, move on. Colette punctures that fantasy with a line that’s both sly and unsentimental. “Writing only leads to more writing” reframes the act not as a cure but as a contagion. One sentence breeds the next, a draft produces its own problems, a scene demands a counter-scene. The joke is that the “only” sounds like a complaint, but it’s also a quiet boast: if you’re truly writing, you’ve already stepped onto a moving walkway.
Colette’s intent is practical, almost craft-level wisdom delivered with novelist’s compression. She’s naming the momentum and the trap. Writing doesn’t resolve life; it multiplies it into language, and language has an appetite. The subtext is work ethic without moralizing: inspiration is less a lightning bolt than a self-generating system. Start, and you’ll have to keep starting. Stop, and the mind keeps composing anyway.
Context matters. Colette built a career out of turning lived experience - female desire, performance, scandal, domestic negotiation - into prose that feels tactile and alert. For a woman writing in a culture eager to file her under “sensational,” the line also reads as defiance. The more she wrote, the less anyone else got to narrate her. It’s a warning to dabblers, but it’s also a liberation: the page isn’t an endpoint; it’s a door that opens onto another room, then another.
Colette’s intent is practical, almost craft-level wisdom delivered with novelist’s compression. She’s naming the momentum and the trap. Writing doesn’t resolve life; it multiplies it into language, and language has an appetite. The subtext is work ethic without moralizing: inspiration is less a lightning bolt than a self-generating system. Start, and you’ll have to keep starting. Stop, and the mind keeps composing anyway.
Context matters. Colette built a career out of turning lived experience - female desire, performance, scandal, domestic negotiation - into prose that feels tactile and alert. For a woman writing in a culture eager to file her under “sensational,” the line also reads as defiance. The more she wrote, the less anyone else got to narrate her. It’s a warning to dabblers, but it’s also a liberation: the page isn’t an endpoint; it’s a door that opens onto another room, then another.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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