53 quotes found
“It's not easy to kill a mountain goat. He thinks with his spine.”
“What do you call the Hrothgar-wrecker when Hrothgar has been wrecked?”
“My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek out gold and sit on it.”
“It would be, for me, mere pointless pleasure, an illusion of order for this one frail, foolish, flicker-flash in the long dull fall of eternity.”
“This highest kind of truth is never something the artist takes as given. It's not his point of departure but his goal. Though the artist has beliefs, like other people, he realizes that a salient c...”
“People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged you...”
“As every writer knows... there is something mysterious about the writer's ability, on any given day, to write. When the juices are flowing, or the writer is 'hot', an invisible wall seems to fall a...”
“The best way a writer can find to keep himself going is to live off his (or her) spouse. The trouble is that, psychologically at least, its hard. Our culture teaches none of its false lessons more ...”
“Self pity is easily the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality.”
“I know everything, you see,' the old voice wheedled. 'The beginning, the present, the end. Everything. You now, you see the past and the present, like other low creatures: no higher faculties than ...”
“Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see.”
“The true artist plays mad with his soul, labors at the very lip of the volcano, but remembers and clings to his purpose, which is as strong as the dream. He is not someone possessed, like Cassandra...”
“They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.”
“The writer's characters must stand before us with a wonderful clarity, such continuous clarity that nothing they do strikes us as improbable behavior for just that character, even when the characte...”
“As in the universe every atom has an effect, however minuscule, on every other atom, so that to pinch the fabric of Time and Space at any point is to shake the whole length and breadth of it, so in...”
“The instruction here is not for every kind of writer - not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi - though it is true that what holds for the most serious...”
“The people I've known who wanted to become writers, knowing what it meant, did become writers.”
“When I was a child I truly loved:Unthinking love as calm and deepAs the North Sea. But I have lived,And now I do not sleep.”
“The point is, whether or not they show it at dinner parties, writers learn, by a necessity of their trade, to be the sharpest of observers.”
“Because his art is sucha difficult one, the writer is not likely to advance in the worldas visibly as do his neighbors: while his best friends from highschool or college are becoming junior partner...”
“Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partlynatural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, mostof which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity orincivilit...”
“...ultimately it come down to, are you making or are you destroying? If you try very hard to create ways of living, create dreams of what is possible, then you win. If you don't, you may make a for...”
“A dragon is a confusion at the heart of things, a law unto himself. He embraces good, evil, and indifference; in his own nature he makes them indivisible and absolute. He knows who he is. Surely yo...”
