Castleandthings Quotes & Sayings

The most futile thing a man can do is to ponder the alternatives, to stew and fret over the life that might have been lived if circumstances had not pointed his future in a certain direction. — William Styron

Do the books that writers don't write matter? It's easy to forget them, to assume that the apocryphal bibliography must contain nothing but bad ideas, justly abandoned projects, embarrassing first thoughts. It needn't be so: first thoughts are often best, cheeringly rehabilitated by third thoughts after they've been loured at by seconds. Besides, an idea isn't always abandoned because it fails some quality control test. The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time — Julian Barnes

The hope of Internet anarchists was that repressive governments would have only two options: accept the Internet with its limitless possibilities of spreading information, or restrict Internet access to the ruling elite and turn your back on the 21st century, as North Korea has done. — Peter Singer

At some point on your road you have to turn and start walking back towards yourself. Or the past will pursue you, and bite the nape of your neck, leave you bleeding in the ditch. Better to turn and face it with such weapons as you possess. — Hilary Mantel

Seven o'clock and you watched it and then you turned it off. The Fifties. It's like that in movies and television programs, but its plot there. The characters get some information from the newscaster and then they turn it off so they can speak. But we were the characters then. We still are, I guess, so it's only a matter of time before we start seeing television shows where the people turn on the news to get some information and then, instead of turning it off so they can speak, they leave it on, and we get swept into some endless video vortex, some film loop, which has us by the eyes and won't let us go. — Alberto Alvaro Rios

Nothing is sillier than the creative writing teacher's dictum
"Write about what you know." But whether you're writing
about people or dragons, your personal observation of how
things happen in the world - how character reveals itself - can
turn a dead scene into a vital one. Preliminary good advice
might be: Write as if you were a movie camera. Get exactly
what is there. All human beings see with astonishing accuracy,
not that they can necessarily write it down. — John Gardner

As soon as you willfully allow a dialogue with temptation to begin, the soul is robbed of peace, just as consent to impurity destroys grace. — Josemaria Escriva