He knows what you are going through and, believe me, He feels every ounce of your pain. He will use it for your good . . . that is what He has promised. I did not make that promise. Nor did your father. But the very God who created all of these stars...
The sting of her abandonment had not lessened through the years, and I suspected it would never go away. Occasionally, I could see agony in her eyes, the shadows that flickered in the background. If I could, I'd take her pain and make it my own. I'd ...
He cut away the insignificant and incidental. Those bits were tossed away from the juicy core pieces. He slid the excess tissue and tendons away and reorganized the good bits on his plate. Those pieces were translated into words and catchy phrases an...
That first pregnancy is a long sea journey to a country where you don't know the language, where land is in sight for such a long time that after a while it's just the horizon - and then one day birds wheel over that dark shape and it's suddenly clos...
Depression is not madness, it's just depression, the loser version, the low-energy response to bad stuff that happens in your life. When you're depressed, you think you're the only one to have ever tasted this kind of hurt. And that lonely self-regar...
...kids marked by the special thinness that one has only once, the transparent thinness of early maturity, when, without knowing it, you are immortal. And completely permeable. When you can walk indifferently down the street with a lover because you ...
When I'd begun my last relationship, nearly two decades ago, I'd been unaware of the rule that new lovers must hoard the 'L Word' the way atomic nations hoard their explosives, like something that, once detonated, would change their world forever.
I want to write. I've already told my mother: That's what I want to do-write. No answer the first time. Then she asks, Write what? I say, Books, novels. [...] She's against it, it's not worthy, it's not real work, it's nonsense. Later she said, A chi...
Writing from the perspective of women survivors of violence, Moore is at his most appealing; though his writing about sex and brutality can verge on the exploitative, he sometimes reveals an unexpected sympathy with dominated women.
Elsa's mother no longer spoke to her of men and love, but of duty and fate and accepting one’s burden. As far as Elsa could tell, if love really was the inherited female domain, then women were saddled with the biggest burden of all. It was pressin...
I already read everything. I read poems and plays and novels and newspapers and comic books and magazines. I read tins in supermarkets and leaflets that come through the door, unsolicited mail. None of it lasts long and it doesn't give me answers. Re...
In order to exert influence over people, there were other things that could be used besides love. Knowledge seemed to be an equally strong force, perhaps even stronger. Whoever possessed knowledge not only had power over the changeable passions of pe...
For just a second, Lauren wonders if she’s going insane. But insane people don’t think they’re insane, everybody knows that. But...since that fact of insanity is common knowledge, doesn’t that mean an insane person could use it to convince th...
Superficially my war was a comfortable exercise in futility carried out in a grand Scottish hotel amongst the bridge players and swillers of easy-come-by whisky. My chest got me out of active service and into guilt, as I wrote two, or is it three of ...
When you consider time and change, you realize that a people does not originate when individuals merge into a bigger thing. Instead, a people arises when many actions and movements combine into novel patterns of change. For a people is always in the ...
Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new ...
...each reader creates his own film inside his head, gives faces to the characters, constructs every scene, hears the voices, smells the smells. ...whenever a reader goes to see a film based on a novel that he likes, he leaves a feeling disappointed,...
Because life, as Pablo Picasso averred, 'is a very bad novel', it has to be reworked through the writers' suffering into something much more meaningful, much more valuable. A life lived and relived, then, emitting intensity and beauty only achievable...
I pretty much drink a cup of coffee, write in my journal for a while, and then sit at a computer in my office and torture the keys. My one saving grace as a writer is that, if I'm having trouble with the novel I'm writing, I write something else, a p...
It’s a powerful moment, when you discover a vocabulary exists for something you’d thought incommunicably unique. Personally, I felt it reading Joseph Conrad’s “Lord Jim.” I have friends who’ve found themselves described in everything from...
Problem, purpose, conflict, goal. Use them. Think about them while you are in the planning phase of your novel; keep these elements at the back of your mind to guide you while you write. When you have written a scene, make sure they are all there, or...
