471. It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to begin and the beginning. And not try to go further back.

471. It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to being at the beginning. And not to try to go further back.

Beginnings are very elusive things, almost as elusive as true endings.

It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.

I'm uncomfortable beginning at the beginning. It's not because I'm clever, but because it's a difficult thing, writing.

All beginnings are very troublesome things.

One rarely knows where to begin the search for meaning, though by necessity, we can only start where we are.

The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That's how life is most of the time, isn't it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It's the getting there that's challenging.

Every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences.

To find the Father of all is hard. And when found, it is impossible to utter Him.

Cause sometimes it's hard to let the future begin!

Where do begin, he asked, Where you always have to begin, at the beginning,

People like myself who must begin again and again in order to get anywhere at all.

Beginning a book is unpleasant. I'm entirely uncertain about the character and the predicament, and a character in his predicament is what I have to begin with. Worse than not knowing your subject is not knowing how to treat it, because that's finally everything. I type out beginnings and they're awful, more of an unconscious parody of my previous book than the breakaway from it that I want. I need something driving down the center of a book, a magnet to draw everything to it — that's what I look for during the first months of writing something new. I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive. Okay, I say to myself, that's your beginning, start there; that's the first paragraph of the book. I'll go over the first six months of work and underline in red a paragraph, a sentence, sometimes no more than a phrase, that has some life in it, and then I'll type all these out on one page. Usually it doesn't come to more than one page, but if I'm lucky, that's the start of page one. I look for the liveliness to set the tone. After the awful beginning come the months of freewheeling play, and after the play come the crises, turning against your material and hating the book.