« I write just one or two pages a day, yes, only in the morning, and I never add or take out anything. But what is important is that I never have a plan or a story in mind. Each page is revealed to me at the moment I start to write. This is the only way that I can write, for writing is not a job for me, nor an art, but a faith, a sort of a personal religion. To continue writing I don’t need to know where I’m headed, only that I can do it, that I’m the only one who can.
This is how I wrote my most important books—Orbitor v. 1-3 (Blinding v. 1), Levantul, Nostalgia (Nostalgia), and Solenoid—and this is how, for forty-five years, I have written my journal, which is the point of origin for all my writings.
(…)
I’ve always written about myself to understand my situation and to heal myself (to paraphrase Kafka and Salinger, respectively).
(…)
My journal is made of the same stuff as my literature. It’s literature in the same way that my literature is actually a journal. Kafka used to write both his daily notes and his stories in the same notebooks, making very little or no distinction between them.
It is almost the same with me. I cannot tell you how important it is to write these notes for me, day by day, drawing in my notebooks all the tropisms of my mind and body, each thought, each sensation, each symptom, each vision, each and every dream.
It is my scriptural skin, following, in a topological way, all the protrusions and intrusions of my body, mind, soul. If I cannot write for three or four days in my journal, I suffer a real and painful panic attack. »
Source : A CONVERSATION WITH MIRCEA CĂRTĂRESCU, December 11, 2018 by Rodrigo Hasbún