120 quotes found
“Now wasn’t the time for freaking out, I needed to know what the hell I’m dealing with. I took another breath and turned. Facing me was my former friend, their loyal sidekick, and the unwilling part...”
“The characters act for reasons that they can’t control and, as readers, we have to believe in their motivations, their sense of choice and in the reality of their suffering, even though, deep down,...”
“Real people are made out of a whole lot of things—flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words.”
“Is the writer cruel that makes his characters suffer only to bring them to triumph or tragedy in the end?”
“The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people w...”
“It’s very true; there are many more iron pots certainly than porcelain. But you may depend on it that every one bears some mark; even the hardest iron pots have a little bruise, a little hole somew...”
“I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' neve...”
“It’s weird how much things can change in only a few minutes. With those three words, “I don’t remember,” our entire futures were changed. Not just for me and Brooklyn, but for the little girl, and ...”
“Rob; you could have been someone I wanted to be with. But you’re not; you never spoke to Niall, not really. You joked and you danced, but how often did you really talk? You never even told him you ...”
“Hard and cruel though it may seem," said the Cardinal, "yet we, who hold our high office as keepers and watchmen to the story, may tell you, verily, that to its human characters there is salvation ...”
“. . . clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.”
“It seems to me that you might create any sort of character in a novel and there would be at least one person in the world just like him. We humans are simply incapable of imagining non-human action...”
“...it's not the stories - it's the pain and the joy and the people who stay with you long after the stories are told ...”
“That's what novels are: They're amalgams of archetypes, collections of random traits one observes in other people through life, blended into fresh characters.”
“The only way you can talk about this great tide in which you’re a participant is as Schopenhauer did: the universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too.”
“Anyone can be a story. Everyone is.”
“The driver, a black silhouette upon his box, whipped up his bony horses. Icy silence in the coach. Marius, motionless, his body braced in the corner of the carriage, his head dropping down upon his...”
“The characters who go to make up my stories and novels are not portraits. Characters I invent along with the story that carries them. Attached to them are what I've borrowed, perhaps unconsciously,...”
“You’re the girl that I have been wanting. You’re the girl that I could see myself with forever. And most importantly, you’re the girl that I’ve fallen in love with.”
“No writing is effortless. I’m not saying you can’t have a good day where the words just kind of flow, but even those words have to be edited. Probably more than once. And I’m not saying a character...”
