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"I'm my characters' galley slave."
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Exlpore more Writing quotes
"A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, "Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought." To finish is sadness to a writer, a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done."
"Certainly the plagiarism, and dealing with the fallout of it, was the most difficult thing I've ever faced since I started writing."
"Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it."
"I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine."
"Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do- to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street."
"T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others."
Explore more quotes by Chloe Thurlow
"I read the novel I had been writing for several months with an odd sense that it was the work of a stranger. I usually work in the dead hours of night and surprising the manuscript mid-morning revealed the flaws and excesses it was trying to conceal."
"If you add the shadow of death to a moment of passion you are in that instant free of all normal ties, your mind grows still and your body enters a state of non-being."
"When you succumb to obedience, in an erotic sense, you are not giving away a part of yourself, but seeking something new, something other, within yourself."
"When you've been everywhere, tried it all and done it all, what's left is the exploration of self, intellectually and sexually, through curiosity and erotica."
"To listen to criticism and act on it if it is valid and ignore it if it is not is a sign of intelligence."
"Life is a long road with lots of junctions and every time you chose to go one way, you may just have easily have gone the other. We don't make choices so much as choices are made like a new fashion we slip into without realising."
"After making love there is nothing like making love, slowly, idly, like walking without a destination, or swimming in a warm sea."
"Who knows why we do it? And when we've done it, nobody wants it. Still we keep doing it. That's what makes a writer a writer."
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