When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.
One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers. In short: the ones you want on your own desk.
A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.
Are you sorry? Do you wish you could do it all again and go off and write novels instead of being a teacher? No. You can’t trade what is for what might have been.
Stories that pander to your every readerly desire and whim are like overly loyal dogs that live for the simple glow of your approval. I'm a cat person. I like a little aloofness in my pets and my writing.
When I read that the flash came, and I took a sheet of paper. . .and I wrote on it: I, Emily Byrd Starr, do solemnly vow this day that I will climb the Alpine Path and write my name on the scroll of fame.
Maybe I can learn to live in a way that makes it worth writing about, and maybe I can actually become something more than this empty shell.
If you still persist in writing, "Good food at it's best", you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.
The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.
Books have a life. They breathe. When you write a book, it grows and changes. You learn from your characters after you create them. They come from you and you become them.
But this lump does not absolve me, because I got it through heedlessness, not though courage. I run my tongue over my lip and what do I do? I write. But bad literature brings no redemption.
When Tito was born, I was writing my fifth novel. That was how I saw my future: living in Venice and jumping from novel to novel. Tito's birth changed all that.
I'm under strict instructions to write a happy ending. Rule number ninety-seven: You're not allowed to make a dragon cry." "Right," Said Sophie, starting the engine. "Tears might quench their fire.
The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.
Granted, there is always much that is hidden, and we must not forget that the writing of history - however dryly it is done and however sincere the desire for objectivity - remains literature. History's third dimension is always fiction
It pains me even now, even a million years later, to write about such human misbehaviour. A million years later, I feel like apologizing for the human race. That’s all I can say.
If a novelist were so uncouth and possessed of so little moral sense that he should write of illicit love, his book would be barred from the public libraries and he woukd be ostracized by society.
And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job--where the machine seems to run on much as usual--I loath the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much.
You keep your followers confused when you begin very well and give up too early... Suspense is useful in movies, but useless when writing your success stories!
The shows she’d watch on the Discovery Channel hadn’t prepared her for a kidnapping. Terrorist attack? Yes. Defending her home? Yes. Kidnapped by a police officer? No. She’d have to write to the network about that.
Two whores who finally found something to mother. A guy could write a book about it, he thought bitterly, call it . It would probly be a very long book. Whores did not produce as fast as rabbits.
