When, consciously, thirteen years old, I consciously claimed the desire to write – I wrote as a child, but I had not claimed a destiny -, when I claimed the desire to write, I suddenly found myself in a void. And in that void there was nobody who could help me. I had to lift up myself from a nothingness, I myself had to understand myself, I myself had to invent, in a manner of speaking, my own truth. I started, and it wasn't even from the beginning. The papers piled up – the meanings contradicted one another, the despair of not being able was one more obstacle for really not being able to. The never-ending story which I then began to write […], what a pity that I didn't keep it: I tore it up, despising an entire attempt at apprenticeship, at self-knowledge. And doing everything in such secrecy. I didn't tell anyone; I lived that pain alone. One thing I had already guessed: I would hgave to try to write always, not waiting for a better moment because that would simply never come. Writing was always difficult for me, even though I had begun with what is known as vocation. Vocation is different from talent. One can vocation and not talent; one can be called and not know how to go.

Clarice Lispector, cited in Benjamin Moser's biography