Sartre equated writing with living itself

Evidence

For Sartre, not writing was like not living. He wrote: ‘For years, I haven’t finished anything. I don’t know why. Yes I do: the Corydrane.’ — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 969

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader existentialist theme of contingent, embodied existence — a thinker whose being was literally his productivity. — connects to: Sartre came to doubt whether art alone could justify a life — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 698; Sartre’s intellectual overproduction stemmed from compulsive generosity and engagement, not vanity or money — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 846; Sartre saw black poetry as reversing the oppressive colonial gaze — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 863 (+1 more)
• SHARE: That blunt ‘Yes I do: the Corydrane’ — Sartre naming his amphetamine addiction as the cause of his own writing block — is exactly the kind of tragicomic detail to send to a friend into Sartre or literary biography.