23 quotes found
“It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.”
“Action is the pulse of any good story, but the character is the heart. If the action has no consequence to the character, the story loses heart.”
“When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.”
“I believe one of the important differences between creating literature and just telling a story around the campfire is that in literature youre recreating the experience of life, not just relaying ...”
“Basically, if the author is totally un-educated, then the text won't bring out his best. Normal, educated people always understand that. But here's the thingwhen the author is very highly-educated,...”
“If you love somebody then tell them how you feel dont be scared of their reaction or rejection life is too short. you should take a chance and if things dont work out as you plan dont worry cuz lif...”
“Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.”
“After finishing 1st draft of a novel, I have the characters, dialogue, scenes, and a plotline. I used to think this meant I knew where the story was going, and what the book was about.I have learne...”
“I still suspect that most people start out with some kind of ability to tell a story but that it gets lost along the way. Of course, the ability to create life with words is essentially a gift. If ...”
“If she was going to write a novel, she felt defeated before she began, because someone might be coming along to pick it apart, looking for symbols like The Conch or The Whale, which seemed to have ...”
“I am often told that the model of balance for the novelist should be Dante, who divided his territory up pretty evenly between hell, purgatory, and paradise. There can be no objection to this, but ...”
“He has the mistaken notion that a concern with grace is a concern with exalted human behavior, that it is a pretentious concern. It is, however, simply a concern with the human reaction to that whi...”
“Do what you love, especially if your sharing the word”
“He was always crazy about her. If he was a king then she was his crest the emblem of his kingdom. Without her, his world is lost. He left his house or rather palace, now spends his days on some fil...”
“Fiction is a careful combination of observation, inspiration, and imagination.”
“It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.”
“Fiction must convince our bodies for it to have any chance of convincing our minds.”
“Inside a wool jacket the man had made a pocket for the treasure and from time to time he would jiggle the pocket, just to make sure that it was still there. And when on the train he rode to work he...”
“She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one - for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best f...”
“To be stories at all they must be a series of events: but it must be understood that this series - the plot, as we call it - is only really a new whereby to catch something else.”
