voice

I have remained true to my deepest convictions. I mean the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as comedy—for otherwise how can we manage to bear it? ~ Penelope Fitzgerald

“When someone is mean to me, I just make them a victim in my next book.”

~ Mary Higgins Clark

You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed. ~ Anita Brookner

“If you don’t allow yourself the possibility of writing something very, very bad, it would be hard to write something very good.” ~ Steven Galloway

“I love and care about literature, and great writers are our teachers. You’re studying their mind when you read their work.” ~ Natalie Goldberg

“Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people’s conversation. One has for one’s raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.” ~ Evelyn Waugh

“Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.”  ~ D. H. Lawrence

“Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.” ~ Orson Scott Card

“The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.” ~ Barry Sanderson

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you’re writing.  ~ Gene Wolfe