Good fiction often takes the banal around us and defamiliarizes it.
– Edmund White
Category: Quotable
Quotable 435
Remind yourself, every day, that you’re doing this to try to find something out about yourself, about the world, about words and how they fit together. Writing is investigation. Just keep seeking.
– Naomi Alderman
Quotable 434
You can’t wait for inspiration because it may never come.
– Erskin Caldwell
Quotable 433
The true influence of a great novel is to say to a subsequent novelist, Go thou and do otherwise.
– Julian Barnes
Quotable 432
God preserve us from writers who regurgitate what they have learnt from books! It is people’s secrets we want to know – it is the natural history of the human heart that we have been trying to put down for a thousand years.
– August Strindberg
Quotable 431
So where do the ideas actually come from? Mostly from getting annoyed about things. Not big issues so much … as the little irritations that drive you wild out of all proportion.
– Douglas Adams
Quotable 430
To write you have to have stories you want to tell, you have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.
– Tracy Kidder
Quotable 429
The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what its about and why you’re doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising … and it’s magic and wonderful and strange.
– Neil Gaiman
Quotable 428
Part of being a writer is getting yourself quiet enough and out of the way enough that the character can just speak.
– Callie Khouri
Quotable 427
I don’t fire up the prose. I just tell it straight and don’t fool around with it.
– Raymond Carver