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"In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible."
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"May your first day in hell last ten thousand years, and may it be the shortest."
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Personal Development
"Sometime later the islanders on a little rimward atoll were amazed to find, washed into their little local lagoon, the wave-rocked corpse of a hideous sea monster, all beaks, eyes and tentacles. They were further astonished at its size, since it was rather larger than their village. But their surprise was tiny compared to the huge, stricken expression on the face of the dead monster, which appeared to be have been trampled to death."
Author Name
Personal Development
"There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Villainessa Tittel was a hired killer, an assassin by trade. She had enjoyed the best education and had been trained by assassins who had (until then at least) been considered the best in the business. She had turned to 'cleaning' as an occupation because she really enjoyed endings more than beginnings " and anyway, she didn't need to know her mark's entire pedigree or life's story, or to have some kind of facetious moral justification just to collect her fee. Unsurprisingly, when she did read " on those rare occasions " her books were always dog-eared from the back."
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Personal Development
"Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish."
Author Name
Personal Development
"When one day an expedition was sent to the spatial coordinates that Voojagig had claimed for the planet they discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered to be lying."
Author Name
Personal Development
"If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore."
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Personal Development
"If you are writing fiction, think like a god. Release all the power of your imagination; create worlds and destroy them at your will, create as many miracles as your story needs."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The beautiful illusion of fiction is that everything makes sense and that there was a purpose, that there was a point to it all. And that's the best possible lie because it may even be true."
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Personal Development
"With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible."
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"Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start."
Family
"One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime."
Poetry
"A lot of my students are Asian-American, and it has been thrilling to watch them break through the stereotypes into something alive and surprising."
Students
"Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity."
Time
"What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it."
Poetry
"One of the most powerful devices is to distort time, to go from human time to atomic time, geologic time. Sometimes you can actually accomplish that, with one unexpected word choice."
Time
"The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times."
Poetry
"Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back."
Love
"Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques."
Poetry
"Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that."
Literature
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