Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, on writing / Clarice Lispector, sobre la escritura

Porque ahora te hablo en serio: no estoy jugando con palabras. Me encarno en las frases voluptuosas e ininteligibles que se ovillan más allá de las palabras. Y un silencio se evoca sutil del entrechocar de las frases.

Entonces escribir es el modo de quien tiene a la palabra como carnada: la palabra pescando lo que no es palabra. Cuando esa no-palabra _la entrelínea_ muerde la carnada, alguna cosa ha sido escrita. Una vez que se pescó la entrelínea, se podría con alivio desechar la palabra. Pero ahí cesa la analogía: la no palabra, al morder la carnada, la incorporó. Lo que salva entonces es escribir distraídamente.

No quiero tener la terrible limitación de quien vive sólo de lo que es pasible de tener sentido. Yo no: lo que quiero es una verdad inventada.

De Água viva. Última edición en español: el cuenco de plata, 2010

Because now I'm being serious – I'm not playing with words. I'm embodied in the voluptuous, unintelligible phrases that are wound beyond words. And a silence of colliding phrases is subtly evoked.

Writing is then the manner of those who have words as their bait – words fishing for not-words. When the not-word – the between-lines – bites the bait, something will have been written. Once the between-lines has been fished words can be discarded with relief. Yet the analogy stops there. In biting the bait, the not-word incorporated it. What saves us, therefore, is writing distractedly.

I don't want to bear the terrible limitation of those who live only on what may be susceptible to having meaning. I don't; what I want is a made-up truth.

From her book Água viva. New Directions has recently published a new translation of this novel, along with three more of her books. You can find a review of the four novels here.