I've written some poetry I don't understand myself

Writing is often the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about.

Thinking Outrageously, I Write in Cursive

Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad.

I cannot write anything that I understand too well. If I know what something means to me, if I have already come to the end of it as an experience, I can't write it because it seems a twice-told tale. I have to astonish myself, and that of course is a very costly way of going about things, because you can go up a dead end and discover that it's beyond your capacity to discover some organism underneath your feeling, and you're left simply with a formless feeling which is not itself art. It's inexpressible and one must leave it until it is hardened and becomes something that has form and has some possibility of being communicated. It might take a year or two or three or four to emerge.

I write
to astonish myself

It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

You can't write. That's not writing. It's scribbling. Distasteful scribbling. Why can't you write properly?

I wrote too many poems in a language I did not yet know how to speak.

Day 468—said the word ‘finger’ until it no longer made sense. Now, looking at my fingers I have no idea what they are, / except they’re wildly useful / for writing letters to my earliest ancestors

I really do think with my pen, because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing.

Because of my inability to write, things became very difficult for me and I was very apprehensive at how this would all end.

I have forgotten the reason, forgive me. I have forgotten my name in the language I was born to, forgive me.

At first, writing for The New Yorker was very scary to me. I couldn't imagine anything that I would write in that typeface.