Quotes & Sayings About Writers And Life

Most people think that making a living from books is fun or joyful, but there's much more to it than what the eyes can see, and I wish I had more time for more profitable and also joyful activities. — Robin Sacredfire

Writer's heaven is the place where you decide to rewrite your life the way you wish you had lived it. Because a writer's power, Marcus, is that he gets to decide the ending of the book. He has power over life and death; he has the power to change everything. Writers have more power in their fingertips than they imagine. All they have to do is close their eyes and they can change an entire lifetime. What might — Joel Dicker

There's something about the alchemy of the show - the actors, the writers, the directors, the editors - that makes 'Parenthood' unique. You get so deeply embedded with these characters because you go through life with them, and that's our priority. — Jason Katims

Those who lead a literary life seem old when they're young and young when they're old, but they're never actually either. Like a good book, they are bound by neither category nor time. — J.C. Hallman

When the last autumn of Dickens's life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation?
Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute? — Dan Simmons

I believe the best reviews are any of those wherein readers share their true opinion, no matter how many stars they rate my work. When I receive responses from appreciative people thanking for useful and amusing reading, it feels like my wings stretch up and blood carries the highest happiness circulating in my veins. I think many writers will understand what I mean by that. — Sahara Sanders

The so called beautiful people, especially the ones who are obsessed with their looks, bore me. They just have this superficiality in all things that they do or want to accomplice in life. It is like they want to look 'beautiful' all the time but not 'be beautiful' from within. I like depth. People who go deep into the way of things and the meaning of life. People who may not look beautiful but are truly beautiful! — Avijeet Das

Most writers can write three times as many books as I have and still live a life. — James Salter

Enjoy writers and entertainers but don't substitute their synthesis of truth and reality for your own. Seek your own counsel as much as you can. Dependence on any one or anything else will eventually result in disappointment and this may be, as it always was. — Nikhil Sharda

Auditions are an opportunity to play and go in there and bring the character to life. The writers have it stuck in their head and haven't seen it jump off the page. — Jodie Sweetin

Mary Lovell's Straight On Till Morning: The Life of Beryl Markham was the first biography to bring Beryl to light, in 1987, and her pioneering efforts and careful research have been crucial to my own and other writers' abilities to imagine Beryl's life. Mary Lovell also compiled Beryl Markham's stories in The Splendid Outcast, a collection that wouldn't have been available otherwise, and for that — Paula McLain

Humanity is an organism, inherently rejecting all that is deleterious, that is, wrong, and absorbing after trial what is beneficial, that is, right. If so disposed, the Architect of the Universe, we must assume, might have made the world and man perfect, free from evil and from pain, as angels in heaven are thought to be; but although this was not done, man has been given the power of advancement rather than of retrogression. The Old and New Testaments remain, like other sacred writings of other lands, of value as records of the past and for such good lessons as they inculcate. Like the ancient writers of the Bible our thoughts should rest upon this life and our duties here. "To perform the duties of this world well, troubling not about another, is the prime wisdom," says Confucius, great sage and teacher. The next world and its duties we shall consider when we are placed in it. — Andrew Carnegie

Books can truly change our lives: the lives of those who read them, the lives of those who write them. Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew about the world and about themselves. — Lloyd Alexander

It's a great paradox and a great injustice that writers write because we fear death and want to leave something indestructable in our wake, and at the same time, are drawn to things that kill: whiskey and cigarette, unprotected sex and deep fried burritos.
It's true that you can get away with drinking and smoking and sunbathing when you're in your teens and twenties, and it's true that rock stars are free to die at twenty-nine, but a lit star needs a long life. — Ariel Gore

No.'
It's not a bad word.
And it is very important to use at times.
Practice saying it in the mirror.
It's empowering. — Christy Hall

When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver. — Amos Oz

Like actors and writers who are on and off again in terms of employment, I had a very unstructured life. — Buzz Aldrin

Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species. — Samuel Johnson

Writers are first and foremost observers. We lose ourselves in the watching and then the telling of the world we find. Often we feel on the fringes, in the margins of life. And that's where we belong. What you are a part of, you cannot observe. — Lisa Unger

The word 'NO' is the best motivation there is for the storyteller in you. — A.K. Kuykendall

I always tell my students to seek out other writers as models, and though it took me years to heed my own advice, it really was life-altering when I found writers who wrote long stories, full of back story and side plots and sub-histories. — Molly Antopol

I'll tell you a thing that will shock you. It will certainly shock the readers of Writer's Digest. What I often do nowadays when I have to, say, describe a room, is to take a page of a dictionary, any page at all, and see if with the words suggested by that one page in the dictionary I can build up a room, build up a scene. ... I even did it in a novel I wrote called MF. There's a description of a hotel vestibule whose properties are derived from Page 167 in R.J. Wilkinson's Malay-English Dictionary. Nobody has noticed. ... As most things in life are arbitrary anyway, you're not doing anything naughty, you're really normally doing what nature does, you're just making an entity out of the elements. I do recommend it to young writers. — Anthony Burgess

All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories. — Neil Gaiman

After 30 years in the theater, I'm used to having a great amount of control over what I do. But with '24', you place your character's life in the writers' hands, and you have no idea what's going to happen until you're sent the next pages. — Cherry Jones

Books gnaw at me from around the edges of my life, demanding more time and attention. I am always left hungry. — Pamela Paul

His eyes were staring at the lonely sun that was now beginning its descent behind some far off hills. How lonely its existence was, Ranjan mused. Traveling every single day from East to West, with no break, no company; nothing to wait for, nothing to look forward to, just going on and on, in a cycle of existence that did not have a beginning or end. — Yamini Vijendran

One of the things I really love about TV is this symbiotic relationship you can get between the writers and the actors, and the characters start to come to life because you start to collaborate. — Carla Gugino

Fiction is risky for writers also in that the process of making certain books, of shaping certain narratives, leaves scars and marks on your inner life. — Chris Abani

Our goodness is our wealth and when we close our eyes to the tragedies of the hard lives, we start losing our wealth! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

It always has been and always will be the same. The old folk of our grandfathers' young days sang a song bearing exactly the same burden; and the young folk of to-day will drone out precisely similar nonsense for the aggravation of the next generation. "Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago," has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday. Take up the literature of 1835, and you will find the poets and novelists asking for the same impossible gift as did the German Minnesingers long before them and the old Norse Saga writers long before that. And for the same thing sighed the early prophets and the philosophers of ancient Greece. From all accounts, the world has been getting worse and worse ever since it was created. All I can say is that it must have been a remarkably delightful place when it was first opened to the public, for it is very pleasant even now if you only keep as much as possible in the sunshine and take the rain good-temperedly. — Jerome K. Jerome

Life baffles me most days. Maybe that's why I write. To try and make sense of it all. — Christy Hall

A writer always wears glasses and never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and the other half depressed. He spends most of his life in bars, arguing with other dishevelled, bespectacled writers. He says very 'deep' things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel, and hates the one he has just published. — Paulo Coelho

I walk around engrossed in my stories and worlds, and I love losing myself in them! — Samuel Colbran

The Inklings were comrades who have been touched by war, who view life through the lens of war, yet who look for hope and found it, in fellowship, where so many other modern writers and intellectuals saw only broken narratives, disfigurement, and despair. — Philip Zaleski

I know there are a lot of musicians and a lot of artists, and there are a lot of writers and other people who inspire young people, but I'd like to see somebody in political life be able to connect and make these choices that we need to make in Washington real in terms of people's lives. — John F. Kerry

Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them. — Mark Slouka

The ignorant mass looks upon the man who makes a violent protest against our social and economic iniquities as upon a wild beast, a cruel, heartless monster, whose joy it is to destroy life and bathe in blood; or at best, as upon an irresponsible lunatic. Yet nothing is further from the truth. As a matter of fact, those who have studied the character and personality of these men, or who have come in close contact with them, are agreed that it is their super-sensitiveness to the wrong and injustice surrounding them which compels them to pay the toll of our social crimes. The most noted writers and poets, discussing the psychology of political offenders, have paid them the highest tribute. Could anyone assume that these men had advised violence, or even approved of the acts? Certainly not. Theirs was the attitude of the social student, of the man who knows that beyond every violent act there is a vital cause. — Emma Goldman

The writers of books are companions in one's life and, as such, are often more interesting than other companions. — James Salter

We do not like the truth because it is simple, we do not want the truth because it is hard, and we do not trust the truth because it is free.
Perhaps because many are idealists and publishing is so frustrating, writers are particularly vulnerable to believing in those who offer hope in exchange for cash. Writers know life is tough and we all want to think of an easier way. Maybe for a rare few, there is. If you count on that, you are a chump and somebody is going to take your money and break your heart. — Pat Walsh

One time I dropped a fly ball in Milwaukee and, after the game, the writers asked me what happened. I told them, 'Well, I was looking up and a UFO flew right across. It was weird. I never saw anything like that in my life.' Man, I was only joking and they wrote it up and put it in the paper. — Jesse Barfield

My stories are my children. Some are sweet infants that I coddle and care for. Others are old enough now, they need to damn well get a job! — Christy Hall

Memoirists collect experiences in an attempt to capture the fluttery thing we call life.
---from Blog-"Readers, Writers and Pumpkin Pie — Peggy Barnes

Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out. — Jeanette Winterson

Books had rescued me when i most needed saving... Books were smarter than me and words inspired me... to try something new, charge forward without a clear understanding of what would happen next, because "given something like death, what does it matter if one looks foolish now and then, or tries too hard, or cares too deeply?"
In the end, Thoreau, Whitman, Hafiz, and a dozen other writers put me up to the task of seeing if I dared to "live a life worth living. — Dee Williams

Writers are sponges. They absorb life, then squeeze and ring it out onto a page. Sometimes, if they squeeze too hard, they dry up. Not hard enough and they remain saturated, heavy and unpredictable, as they carry around a volume of ideas too great for their capacity. — Sarah Colliver

Librarians and romance writers accomplish one mission better than anyone, including English teachers: we create readers for life - and what could be more fulfilling than that? — Susan Elizabeth Phillips

I will always know the glory of the beautiful and rare, as they will know security from labour and prayer. As they will hear the laughter of the children they gave life, I will know the torments of the song born under knife. — Roman Payne

Hold on to your heart and life will give you wings. — A.D. Posey

I started out life as a writer, and writers write in part because they don't want to talk. — Gloria Steinem

We can create transcending stories for readers and for us. Creativity is a double edge sword, which can kill the writer. — Rossana Condoleo

Life has a vendetta against writers. It does everything in it's power to get in the way of our craft. Maybe it thinks we embellish too much? — Hannah Harding

No man is greater than his prayer life. The pastor who is not praying is playing; the people who are not praying are straying. We have many organizers, but few agonizers; many players and payers, few pray-ers; many singers, few clingers; lots of pastors, few wrestlers; many fears, few tears; much fashion, little passion; many interferers, few intercessors; many writers, but few fighters. Failing here, we fail everywhere. — Leonard Ravenhill

People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, but still he'd managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited on faculty gossip and professorial antics and the general behavior of academics, who were as a whole no more brilliant or Machiavellian than travel agents. They tended toward shabbier clothes and manners, and of course there was the occasional storied eccentric or truly original mind, but most college campuses - especially the older ones - functioned less as brain trusts than as wildlife preserves, housing and protecting people who wouldn't last a week in GenPop. — Jincy Willett

Writing is one way to explore new ideas and by doing so blunt the sense of personal unrest and discontent. Writing assist us recognize, explore, and accept the patent absurdity of life. Writing facilitates thinking; the reagent substances we produce through writing augment our expanding system of ideas. Writing boldly triggers a chain reaction in our philosophical structure and thus writing can operate to transform who we are. — Kilroy J. Oldster

In general, though, one should never forget the role money plays in shaping the writer's life, and the life inevitably informs the work. My own position is that I always want to convince a publisher to give me adequate money for what I want to do. At the same time, what I want to do is to arrive at full expression in a way that seduces, that pleases people in a way they didn't expect to be pleased, or even want to be pleased. — Tim Parks

I took the route favoured by all worldly failures and became a spiritual success. — Howard Jacobson

Finally I had made that necessary imaginative leap - which is a real necessity, since most of us writers can't be out there living like crazy all the time. These days, very few are the writers whose book jackets list things like bush pilot, big game hunter, or exotic dancer. No, more often we are English teachers. We have children, we have mortgages, we have bills to pay. So we have to stop writing strictly about what we know, which is what they always told us to do in creative writing classes. Instead, we have to write about what we can learn, and what we can imagine, and thus we come to experience that great pleasure Anne Tyler noted when somebody asked her why she writes, and she answered, I write because I want more than one life. — Lee Smith

I never write the storyline ahead of the novel and stick to it like glue. I prefer my writing to be organic. It takes on a life of it's own. — Airam

Books are like rivers, meandering this way and that, but taking us on a steady, flowing course to somewhere different. — Carla H. Krueger

Identifying as a writer is a matter of self-acceptance. It's not a thing that can be given to you, or bestowed upon you. You are a writer if you write. That's it. If what you are seeking is to be acknowledged as a writer by other people, many of them strangers, you're in for a demoralizing journey. It is a silly club where those who have been 'accepted' are loathe to permit others into. It's sort of like how we Americans love denying our own immigrant origins while railing against immigration. — Vincent Louis Carrella

One of the things that put me off writing for a while was that piece of advice everybody gives new writers: 'Write what you know.' Nobody would ever want to read about my boring life! But I do know a lot of things about different societies' cultures and mythologies. The way people were and are. — Carol Berg

Art translates human souls. Each passing eon's public display of sophisticated hieroglyphics cast a unique depiction upon the rudimentary art of survival. Humankind cannot exist without the makeshift paradigm of innovative art, which genuine amoeba expresses elusive and unsayable thoughts. Humankind's gallery of artistic impressions ranges from the starkness of personified cave drawings to the free ranging lexis of modern art. Collection of multihued stories of the ages portrays the vivid panoply of enigmatic vitas etched by humankind's self-imposed sense of urgency. Each passing generation's effusion of trope offerings seamlessly folds its shared renderings into the shimmering panorama of the cosmos, the sparkling nightscape that houses the intangible life force all communal souls. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The world is changing from day to day; it is high time for our writers to take off their masks, look frankly, keenly, and boldly at life, and write about real flesh and blood. It is high time for a brand-new arena for literature, high time for some bold fighters to charge headlong into battle! — Lu Xun

Our generation grew up with the Review as a fact of life. It was America's literary magazine. To our minds, it still is. It has launched our favorite writers. It has made a special claim for the quarterly as such, being both timely and lasting, free of the news of the day or the pressure to please a crowd. Most of all, the Review has shown, repeatedly, that works of imagination can be as stylish and urgent as the flashiest feature reporting, and can do more to refocus our picture of the world. — Lorin Stein

Too many writers cannot come to terms with the ways in which the past, like the future, is dark. There is so much we don't know, and to write truthfully about a life, your own or your mother's, or a celebrated figure's, an event, a crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowning. They tell us that there are limits to knowledge, that there are essential mysteries, starting with the notion that we know just what someone thought or felt in the absence of exact information. — Rebecca Solnit

I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant. — Aberjhani

My spirit has been around far longer than my soul
I've lived several lifetimes already. And one this novel has been written, I will have lived several more. — Terry A. O'Neal

Hey Revision. You can be a pain but you do make Book better. — Buffy Andrews

My fingers burn behind the keys of my typewriter, the lettering fading with every thoughtful strike. The many words I write I dare not stall; my mind perpetually alert for my magnum opus call. — A.K. Kuykendall

Writing is easy. Writing is hard. It's a breeze and a struggle, just like life. — Dennis R. Miller

Literature might be called the art of story, and story might in turn be called a universal language, for every culture we know of has a tradition of storytelling. No doubt stories have touched your life, too, from bedtime stories you may have heard as a child to news stories you see on TV or read in a newspaper. We might even say that a major goal of living is to created the story of our own lives, a story we hope to take pleasure and pride in telling. — Andrea A. Lunsford

Writing isn't about creating perfect characters. There's no such thing. It's about creating characters that are real; flawed
yet beautiful, in that they know they need another person. Needing someone else doesn't make them weak; if they believed all they needed was them self, they would be. A strong heroine isn't afraid to admit that a best friend, or soul mate, is exactly what they need at one moment or another. A strong heroine never stands alone. They stand tall; they believe in who they are. They are perfect in every human flaw, because as humans we are flawed. And in every flaw, I see the perfection of their souls. Writers breath life into simple words and create beings
flaws and all. — Cassandra Giovanni

Nobody wants to hear that any aspect of my awesome life is bad. I get that. But there are days, maybe two or three times a year, when I get completely overwhelmed by my job and go to my office, lie on the floor, and cry for ten minutes. Then I think: Mindy, you have literally the best life in the world besides that hot lawyer who married George Clooney. This is what you dreamed about when you were a weird, determined little ten-year-old. There are more than a thousand people in one square mile of this studio who would kill to have this job. Get your ass up off the floor and go back into that writers' room, you weakling. Then I get up, pour myself a generous glass of whiskey and club soda, think about the sustained grit of my parents, and go back to work. — Mindy Kaling

Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Writers are a superior breed. No one else can face so much rejection and still thrive. — Susie Smith

The day Stamp Paid saw the two backs through the window and then hurried down the steps, he believed the undecipherable language clamoring around the house was the mumbling of the black and angry dead. Very few had died in bed, like Baby Suggs, and none that he knew of, including Baby, had lived a livable life. Even the educated colored: the long-school people, the doctors, the teachers, the paper-writers and businessmen had a hard row to hoe. In addition to having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the weight of the whole race sitting there. You needed two heads for that. Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. — Toni Morrison

People need to understand that what happens in people's homes and behind closed doors, unless you were there, you really shouldn't make any analogy or any assumption, which writers do quite a bit. It's not something I ever for one second thought about. This is not my life story, and I've never told my life story, and I have no interest in telling my life story. — Charlize Theron

I think that writers have natural canvases, and my canvas, even in short stories, often seems to be the scope of a life. — Lauren Groff

His sensitive nature was still smarting under the lashes of an undivided and squalid way of life. His soul was still disquieted and cast down by the dull phenomenon of Dublin. He had emerged from a two years' spell of revery to find himself in the midst of a new scene, every event and figure of which affected him intimately, disheartened him or allured and, whether alluring or disheartening, filled him always with unrest and bitter thoughts. All the leisure which his school life left him was passed in the company of subversive writers whose jibes and violence of speech set up a ferment in his brain before they passed out of it into his crude writings. — James Joyce

Writer's groups work for some new writers, not for others. I was never cut out for a writer's group. So much depends on the people in it. What are they criticizing about your work? Grammar, syntax, plot holes? Or are they criticizing your personal style, your world view and your personal philosophy? If they're criticizing the latter, it's not a good group for you, no matter what support you might think you're getting from it. Your style, your perspective, and your philosophy of life are the main things you have to sell; they are what make you different, and you shouldn't
in fact you can't
change them. — Dean Koontz

Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves. — Helen Garner

My favorite thing about this business is you're just jammed in a room on a set with like-minded people - writers, directors, and art designers and hairdressers. People who didn't work a 9-to-5 but chose this life. You're going to like at least two or three people in that you love these people so much. — Kaitlin Doubleday

The first single I released, 'Anything Goes,' is probably one of the best-written songs I've heard in a long time. It takes somebody knowing who you are. Sometimes writers know who an artist is and what they want to say and how they sing. I will never be opposed to cutting a song if somebody nails my life and what I'm going through. — Randy Houser

The writers of Luke and Matthew, for instance, in seeking to make the life of Jesus conform to Old Testament prophecy, insist that Mary conceived as a virgin (Greek parthenos), harking to the Greek rendering of Isaiah 7:14. Unfortunately for fanciers of Mary's virginity, the Hebrew word alma (for which parthenos is an erroneous translation) simply means "young woman," without any implication of virginity. It seems all but certain that the Christian dogma of the virgin birth, and much of the church's resulting anxiety about sex, was the — Sam Harris

A writer shouldn't be restricted to any single race, society or even country, he or she has to be for the entire world, and writers should try to write on global issues that are affecting peoples' life in a direct or indirect way. — Tim I. Gurung

Thoughtfully or thoughtlessly he had left the keys in the ignition, and I switched on the radio. It was tuned to WQED. A local arts reporter I didn't particularly admire was interviewing old Q. about his life and work and personal demons. I reflected for a moment on the journalistic euphemism that allowed personal demons to writers who were only fucked up. — Michael Chabon

If you write a bad book, mobs do not show up with pitchforks and torches - and odds are you didn't write something bad. — Dan Alatorre

To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to me will be destroyed unread. You must make your way yourself. Why you should be so set on the nearly always disappointing profession is a puzzling question. — Kingsley Amis

The parts of our lives when we write them down seem to belong in different books, by different writers even. What all these bits and pieces make up I don't know. There is no plot. Perhaps meaning is something we invent afterward, putting it all together, like imagined God. — Niall Williams

Freud pointed out, in his Problem of Lay Analysis , that it is extremely unlikely that a young man who would throw the best years of his life into the cloistered drudgery of getting an M.D. degree, could possibly make a good psychoanalyst; so he preferred to look for young analysts among the writers, the lawyers, the mothers of families, those who had chosen human contact. But in their economic wisdom, the Psychoanalytic Institute of Vienna (and New York) overruled him. — Paul Goodman

There was the usual dreaminess, I suppose. Also a shyness that caused me - and others - to notice that I could express myself better by writing than by speaking. This is typical of many writers, I think. What is a drawback in childhood is an asset to a literary life. Not being fluent on one's feet sends one to the page and a habit is born. — Lorrie Moore

And you must not worry about me. You must follow your dreams. You have your life ahead of you. I am just a wanderer passing by. — Avijeet Das

Oh, I'm going to miss everything. It's been the most amazing and significant job of my life obviously and I'll always have it near and dear to my heart. I'm so grateful and appreciative that I worked with the best crew and the best writers and producers and cast and I love them all. — Alyson Hannigan

Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say. Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day; The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away. — William Butler Yeats

They say a writer is not a single person, it is a bunch of characters. What I learned from life is that everyone is a bunch of characters, characters who live and die within us. The moment I was raped, many characters in me died. I lost most of my characteristics. Several new characters were born, one was rage, second was a lifelong unhappiness and third was the fear of helplessness. — Himanshu Chhabra

I'm not into this whole "move with the times" thing. I reckon we should just decide on a year and stick with it. — R.D. Ronald

Real people, smart or otherwise, sometimes make stupid choices, and despite judgment, whether from other writers, readers, or haters, books with outwardly stupid characters making stupid choices will continue to sell, because if you dig a little deeper, you'll find a reason for a character's moment of idiocy; and more notably, this moment of idiocy amidst the chaos of life is real and relatable. — Shona Moyce

Writers are the custodians of memory, and that's what this chapter is about: how to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into. — William Zinsser

Paradise of Lailah Gifty Akita is reading, wondering and writing. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I began to wonder if writers don't choose to love long-distance, a sure way of blending passion and prose. The love letter seems perfectly suited to the contradiction of a writer's life... the love letter may be the emblem of a vocation that demands solitude but desires communication. — Cathy N. Davidson