top of page
.png){kind=small}
"I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny - that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be convertedinto words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end."
Standard
Customized
More
"You spill a lot of beans in historical fiction. Crime fiction is about spilling no beans at all. You spill the least beans you possibly can. So because I had already written historical fiction before I was really good at the spilling beans section, but the new skill I had to learn when I was writing Brighton Belle was difficult. I had to avoid the equivalent of shouting, "this character's a murderer! Look who did it!."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy."
Author Name
Personal Development
"We write, edit, and rewrite the story of our own life employing descriptive words, metaphors, and symbols. Our lives are full of symbols including those supplied by nature and religion, which touch upon the mystical and spiritual aspects of life. Symbols inspire enduring hope by formulating idealist expectations."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I'm a fairly undisciplined writer."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Writers aren't exactly people, they're a bunch of people trying to be one person."
Author Name
Personal Development
"My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Pour your heart onto the page."
Author Name
Personal Development
"You like to write. It's the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough."
Author Name
Personal Development
"One of my rules is never explain. A writer is a lot like a magician, if you explain how the trick works then a lot of the magic turns mundane."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it."
Responsibility
"I carried out my plan because I felt The Chief had some fear of those of my race, of those uncountable forebears whose culmination lies in me. I wished to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies."
Honor
"Day and night, their frail and crippled ships defy the tempest."
Perseverance
"The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information."
Universe
"There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her."
Love
"I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those illusory imaginings, I forgot that I was a pursued man; I felt myself, for an indefinite while, the abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day did their work in me; so did the gently downward road, which forestalled all possibility of weariness. The evening was near, yet infinite."
Imagination
"The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries."
Science
"It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death."
Mortality
"I owe my first inkling of the problem of infinity to a large biscuit tin that was a source of vertiginous mystery during my childhood."
Infinity
"Blind to all fault, destiny can be ruthless at one's slightest distraction."
Destiny
bottom of page