top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Here was the world-famous novelist with her penchant for detail; yet, in her observations of a prostitute with a customer, she had failed to come away with the most important detail of all. She could never identify the murderer; she could barely describe him. She'd made a point of not looking at him!"
Standard
Customized
More
"The bowl is warmer than the soup."
Author Name
Personal Development
"No writer has an imaginative power richer than what the streets offer."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Good God. Men everywhere."
Author Name
Personal Development
"As far as she could see, children mostly argued, shouted, ran around very fast, laughed loudly, picked their noses, got dirty and sulked."
Author Name
Personal Development
"He reads much;He is a great observer and he looksQuite through the deeds of men: he loves no plays,As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music;Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sortAs if he mock'd himself and scorn'd his spiritThat could be moved to smile at any thing.Such men as he be never at heart's easeWhiles they behold a greater than themselves,And therefore are they very dangerous."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Society in its boundless ignorance ridicules the caterpillar but praises the butterfly."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Dickens writes that one of his characters, "listened to everything without seeming to, which showed he understood his business."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Take a perfect day add six hours of rain and fog and you have instant London."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life. If they observed this duty conscientiously, they would give us fewer pictures chequered with vivid contrasts of light and shade; they would seldom elevate their heroes and heroines to the heights of rapture - still seldomer sink them to the depths of despair; for if we rarely taste the fulness of joy in this life, we yet more rarely savour the acrid bitterness of hopeless anguish."
Author Name
Personal Development
"When you see a married couple coming down the street the one who is two or three steps ahead is the one who's mad."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you."
Writing
"Good habits are worth being fanatical about."
Being
"You don't want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven't done what I do. Most book reviewers haven't written 11 novels. Many of them haven't written one."
Enemy
"Half my life is an act of revision."
Life
"More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina."
Life
"I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second."
Reading
"No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin - only four years older than I am - everything, or what little I could discover about him."
Family
"I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin."
Business
"There's no reason you should write any novel quickly."
Reason
"Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy."
Nostalgia
bottom of page