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"Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolutely the best detail for the circumstance. That wasn't much of a theory, but it was all Ruth could truly commit herself to at the moment. It was time to retire that old lecture, and her penance was to endure the compliments of her former credo."
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"The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth."
Author Name
Personal Development
"There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the species, that we lie beyond comprehension. Our embarrassments, our sulks, our envy, our feelings of guilt, these phenomena are conveyed in Austen in a way that affords us bursts of almost magical self-recognition. The author has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, and for a few moments, we see ourselves more clearly and wish to become whom the author would have wanted us to be."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Character in decay is the theme of the great bulk of superior fiction."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Stories are like children. They grow in their own way."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors."
Author Name
Personal Development
"In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then."
Author Name
Personal Development
"She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one - for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best fictional detail was the detail that should have defined the character or the episode or the atmosphere. Fictional truth was what should have happened in a story - not necessarily what did happen or what had happened."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I found it hard to think of leaving my books. They had been my elevators out of the midden, and to whom could I entrust such close friends?"
Author Name
Personal Development
"It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel."
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Personal Development
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"Ruth Cole was a novelist, novelists are not at their best when they go off half-cocked. She believed that she would prepare what she was going to tell the police - preferably in writing."
Work
"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
"It s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can't interfere with people you love any more than you're supposed to interfere with people you don't even know. And that's hard, ..., because you often feel like interfering -you want to be the one who makes the plans."
Relationship
"There's no reason you should write any novel quickly."
Reason
"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
"Self-hatred is worse than loneliness."
Psychology
"She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one - for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best fictional detail was the detail that should have defined the character or the episode or the atmosphere. Fictional truth was what should have happened in a story - not necessarily what did happen or what had happened."
Literature
"Good habits are worth being fanatical about."
Being
"Ever since the Christmas of '53, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving--Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home."
Grief
"People are like that .... They need to make their own worst experiences universal. It gives them a kind of support.' And who can blame them? It is just infuriating to argue with someone like that; because of an experience that has denied them their humanity, they go around denying another kind of humanity in others, which is the truth of human variety -- it stands alongside our sameness."
Humanity
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