Writers World Quotes & Sayings

The defining lines of reality have always been a bit blurred for me. — Christy Hall

This book is written for the professional writer who is making a living, but just barely. It is also for the aspiring writer who is looking for a niche. And for all the writers-in-between who would like to get paid well for writing. Entering the world of corporate communications is not selling out - it is an opportunity to sharpen your skills, practice your craft, and pay the rent, all at the same time! — Mary Moreno

Well, let me try again,' he said. 'If it be true, and no doubt it is, that the proper study of mankind is man, it is also true that man is best studied in the books that he has written about himself; and all books, whatever their subject matter, are in essence autobiographical... Wherefore, it is clear - or is it? - that writers of books are what I have called them, the most fascinating people in the world. — Peter Ruber

When we are in pre-production, this is the best job in the world. Working 10 to 7, sitting around and brainstorming with the other writers, making things funnier and writing and rewriting scenes - that's as fun as it gets. — Paul Lieberstein

With the film, you have a bunch of executive producers, directors, writers, scripts. There's, management, lighting, the union and etc. There are so many components a part of that game, so naturally it isn't my world. — Ashanti

In truth, even if they have an imperfect insight into their own methods, I still slightly mistrust writers of fiction who are assured literary critics; it makes me suspect that they favour the word over the world it should describe. Such scribes fall victim too easily to the solecism of equating style with morality. — Will Self

The world is a woven basket. Every stitch counts. — A.D. Posey

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

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough ... People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself. — Doris Lessing

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers. — Gore Vidal

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

Who is willing to be satisfied with a job that expresses all his limitations? He will accept such work only as a 'means of livelihood' while he waits to discover his 'true vocation'. The world is full of unsuccessful businessmen who still secretly believe they were meant to be artists or writers or actors in the movies. — Thomas Merton

The dilemma for women who love to write may not have so much to do with finding the elusive literary voice, as with being reluctant to use the one that's already lurking inside, just waiting for the chance to speak up. Many of us, especiall,y those from the generations taught to be good, accommodating girls, are afraid of sounding too strong, too loud, too unconventional, or simply too much like the self we're afraid to reveal to the world. Most of us have at least an inkling of what form our writing voice should take, if only we might find the courage to reveal it. — Nava Atlas

There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true. — Henry Fielding

Publish a book before you're too old to read it without glasses. — Fennel Hudson

In matters of good-lookingness, we writers are the ugliest of the bunch, and normally our appearance is akin to that of someone investigating a crime scene; though the women in American writing keep producing world-class beauty in droves, and there are many breathtaking writers among them. — Pat Conroy

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

I wanted to go to a place where I could think, really sink into my own imagination, or ride it, or drift along it, as in a balloon. The kind of place that probably all writers crave. The kind of place where the outside world is still and quiet and you get a chance to listen, to peer, to go inward — Jeanne Marie Laskas

It seemed to me that Q. was talking about the nature of the midnight disease, which started as a simple feeling of disconnection from other people, an inability to "fit in" by no means unique to writers, a sense of envy and of unbridgeable distance like that felt by someone tossing on a restless pillow in a world full of sleepers. Very quickly, though, what happened with the midnight disease was that you began actually to crave this feeling of apartness, to cultivate and even flourish within it. You pushed yourself farther and farther and farther apart until one black day you woke to discover that you yourself had become the chief object of your own hostile gaze. — Michael Chabon

A cliffhanger is when ... — Buffy Andrews

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

Where writers are from is one of the world' s most boring topics. Where we're born, gender or race, wealth or poverty - those are the things we spend time talking about. Stop trying to label me. I'm a writer. Worry about whether I'm any good! — M. J. Hyland

If I were only allowed to read or enjoy art or listen to music made by people whose opinions and beliefs were the same as mine, I think the world would be a pretty dismal sort of a place ... Most, probably all, human beings get to do awful things and believe things that other human beings think they should be burned for believing, and they get to do and believe wonderful things too, and artists, writers, musicians, creators, actors, are nothing if not human beings. — Neil Gaiman

I feel that the world needs writers. We need to know what's really going on. — Anne Roiphe

Columbia is ... for people whose genitals still work, dammit. For writers who want to be brave and persevere in the real world where people often fail. — Scott Kenemore

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

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

Out of respect to writers, you have to read the book in the way in which the author visualised it going out into the world. — Joanna Trollope

Writers do not write about places, they write about people who happen to live in those places. This is something that the labellers and their labels don't understand either. — Aminatta Forna

Isolation is a gift. Everything else is just a test of your endurance. You will be alone with the Gods. Your nights will flame with fire. — Charles Bukowski

Let me be very clear. For me geography does not exist! I strongly object to the whole concept of "foreign literature"...and speaking of national identity: that is how dictatorships get started! In literature there is no periphery and no center; there are only writers. The problem is not geographic but rather numeric. In the 19th century there were at least thirty literary geniuses in Russia, Germany, France, England and the United States. Today we are lucky if there are five writers of that caliber in the whole world...Where does one find good literature today? Mostly in third world countries, because adversity, isolation, combat provide good working conditions. It is harder to be a good writer in a so-called "civilized" country, in the so-called "democracies. — Antonio Lobo Antunes

I have one word to say upon the subject of profound writers, who are grown very numerous of late; and I know very well the judicious world is resolved to list me in that number. I conceive therefore, as to the business of being profound, that it is with writers as with wells; a person with good eyes may see to the bottom of the deepest, provided any water be there; and often, when there is nothing in the world at the bottom, besides dryness and dirt, though it be but a yard and half under ground, it shall pass however for wondrous deep, upon no wiser a reason than because it is wondrous dark. — Jonathan Swift

Now, if the writers of these four books [Gospels] had gone into a court of justice to prove an alibi, (for it is of the nature of an alibi that is here attempted to be proved, namely, the absence of a dead body by supernatural means,) and had they given their evidence in the same contradictory manner as it is here given, they would have been in danger of having their ears cropt for perjury, and would have justly deserved it. Yet this is the evidence, and these are the books, that have been imposed upon the world as being given by divine inspiration, and as the unchangeable word of God. — Thomas Paine

If I write as well as I golf, I'm in trouble! — Buffy Andrews

Writers understand the world better, but they lack the strength to change it. Perhaps that is so because they understand their limitations more than others. — Janvier Chouteu-Chando

The thing I want to write most is the next thing I write. — Carroll Bryant

As I drove out the wrought iron gates I had entered, I noticed for the first time how intricate and beautiful they were. They were forged by hand so many years ago and had stood the test of time. — Buffy Andrews

When many story-tellers occupy themselves with a social world which offers no great variety of lively action, their stories will probably resemble one another as to many of the major incidents, and if they draw on these limited resources like spend thrifts such resemblances will be inevitable
and therefore not significant. — Mary Lascelles

Be what the world needs. — A.D. Posey

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

In such troubled times, we must remember the value writers have - the value of inventing new language to keep pace with the rapidly transforming world around us. — Jonathan Stalling

Chet Raymo is professor of physics and astronomy at Stonehill College in Massachusetts. He is a convinced naturalist with a strong mystical bent. Few writers in our time are able to open up vistas of grandeur in the world of objects and entities as he does. In his book Skeptics and True Believers:The Exhilarating Connection between Science and Religion, he illustrates in his brilliant and inimitable style the marvels that are all around us in this universe. — Ravi Zacharias

I'm fascinated by the magic realism used by many writers. I think it goes hand-in-hand with the Indian experience. It's a very different way of viewing the world. — Joseph Boyden

Horror writers can write about everything in the real world that a mainstream novelist can
plus the supernatural, which is the most fertile field for metaphor imaginable. — Bentley Little

Some writers find that they don't know their themes until they've finished the first draft (I am one). They then rewrite with an eye toward balancing on that tightrope: not too contrived, not too rambling; does what I'm saying about the world below me actually add up to anything? Other writers pay attention to these things as they write the first draft. Either way, an awareness of the macro and micro levels of theme can provide one more tool for thinking about what you should write, and how. — Nancy Kress

You made a poet fall in love with the world. — Avijeet Das

Stories are our gifts to a world that doesn't see us. — Sarah Black

Look, Mr. uh, Wulf I appreciate your trying to warn me about this, Ireally do. But there's no such thing as vampires. They're made-up. We writers made them up. I'm sorry we did such a good job that we made the whole world paranoid, but it's true. They're fictional. Blame Bram Stoker. He started it. — Meg Cabot

The huge egos of great chess players are legendary. Psychologists have been amazed by their vanity, have studied it, and anecdotes concerning it are abundant. But never before has there been such a prima donna as Bobby. Already he has managed to alienate and offend almost everybody in the chess world. That includes officials, patrons, writers, almost everybody and anybody who might be in a position to help him in his career. — Israel Albert Horowitz

There are major writers who have written books [based on my research]. If one looks carefully at the copyright page, you'll see my name. Writers of the stature of Mailer and even bigger. All over the world. — Lawrence Schiller

Writers don't choose their craft; they need to write in order to face the world. — Alice Hoffman

When we sit down to write, we psychically enter a sanctuary. This safe haven is our own personal space where we can say whatever is on our mind, where we can talk about what matters most to us, where we can imagine the kind of world that we would like to live. — Rob Bignell, Editor

Here was the world-famous novelist with her penchant for detail; yet, in her observations of a prostitute with a customer, she had failed to come away with the most important detail of all. She could never identify the murderer; she could barely describe him. She'd made a point of not looking at him! — John Irving

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

Reading books makes us more attentive to our personage and the aesthetic world that we live in. Writers that we idolize use language, logic, and nuance to paint physical and emotional scenes with refined precision. A writer's use of vivid language creates lingering aftereffects that work their wonder on the reader's malleable mind. A stirred mind resurrects our semiconscious memories; it causes us to summon up enduring images of our family, friends, and acquaintances. Just as importantly, inspirational writing makes us recognize our own telling character traits and identify our formerly unexpressed thoughts and feelings. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Authors are far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates their plodding critics. As only those who dare to make mistakes succeed greatly, only those who shake free the wings of their imagination brush, once in a way, the secrets of the great pale world. If such writers go wrong, it is not for the mere brains to tell them so — Gertrude Atherton

That is why my first and most pressing question seems like such an outright act of mutiny. What I want to know is, since when does making art require participation in any community, beyond the intense participation that the art itself is undertaking? Since when am I not contributing to the community if all I want to do is make the art itself? Isn't the art itself my intimate communication with others, with the world, with the unfolding spectacle of the human struggle as we live and coexist on this earth? — Meghan Tifft

I admire writers who have the tenacity to write a blog, and I'm told by everyone that it's an important element in remaining visible in the online world. That said, I'm personally turned off by writers' blogs that do nothing but sing their own accomplishments. — David Starkey

The wind blowing across the British Isles was odorous with fear of asylum seekers, infecting everybody with the panic of impending doom, and so articles were written and read, simply and stridently, as though the writers lived in a world in which the present was unconnected to the past, and they had never considered this to be the normal course of history: the influx into Britain of black and brown people from countries created by Britain. Yet he understood. It had to be comforting, this denial of history. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

He knows I have a soft spot for RLS and not just because he was sick or because we have the same initials but because there's something impossibly romantic about him and because before he started writing Treasure Island he first drew a map of an unknown island and because he believed in invisible places and was one of the last writers to know what the word adventure means. I could give you a hundred reasons why RLS is The Man. Look in his The Art of Writing (Book 683, Chatto & Windus, London) where he says that no living people have had the influence on him as strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. Or when he says his greatest friend is D'Artagnan from The Three Musketeers (Book 5, Regent Classics, London). RLS said: 'When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge, I take them like opium.' And when you read Treasure Island you feel you are casting off. That's the thing. You are casting off and leaving behind the ordinary dullness of the world. — Niall Williams

The exploration of oneself is usually also an exploration of the world at large, of other writers, a process of comparison with oneself with others, discoveries of kinships, gradual illumination of one's own potentialities. — Colin Wilson

Not all writers want to be profound (though an awful lot of them do); some want to entertain, some want to inform; some are trying to provoke the most basic, universal feeling using a minimum of words-I think of Emily Dickinson -to demonstrate how it is to be human in our crazy world today. — Therese Anne Fowler

This involves more than I can discuss here, but do it. Read the writers of great prose dialogue-people like Robert Stone and Joan Didion. Compression, saying as little as possible, making everything carry much more than is actually said. Conflict. Dialogue as part of an ongoing world, not just voices in a dark room. Never say the obvious. Skip the meet and greet. — Janet Fitch

Writers are lucky. Whatever the mood, no matter the longing, the writer can use his words to connect himself to any world he wishes to visit. — Alan Zweibel

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

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

There is a line somewhere in Wozzeck that translates out to, roughly, 'The world is awful.' Yes, I said to myself as I shot across the Bay Bridge not giving a fuck how fast I drove, that sums it up. That is high art: 'The world is awful.' That says it all. This is what we pay composers and painters and the great writers to do: tell us this; from figuring this out, they earn a living. What a masterful, incisive insight. What penetrating intelligence. A rat in a drain ditch could tell you the same thing, were it able to talk. If rats could talk, I'd do anything they said. — Philip K. Dick

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

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

The time has come for writers, especially those who are artists, to admit that in this world one cannot make anything out, just as Socrates once admitted it, just as Voltaire admitted it. — Anton Chekhov

I'll pray for good semen. And I'll get all of my friends to pray for good semen. — Buffy Andrews

Anna is the sort of woman who writers write about, Tom. Somewhere in the third act, women like her save characters like you and me from ourselves. She's the loveliest literary device in the world. — Matthew Norman

Rick Bass is one of a dwindling handful of American fiction writers still celebrating the importance of place, the natural world, and the struggle of a few brave souls to live and work respectfully in what's left of our western wilderness ... The Lives of Rocks is his most lyrical and powerful book to date ... a masterwork. — Howard Frank Mosher

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

Climax: It's all downhill from here. — Buffy Andrews

I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large. — Kenzaburo Oe

I'm not one of those writers who insist they don't read reviews and don't care much about them. I do read them, and I do care about them, and they're not always what you want them to be in an ideal world. — Tom Stoppard

Having a book is somewhat like having a baby, as many woman writers have observed before me: the conception, the long preparation, the wait, the growing heaviness (not of body in this case but of the spirit and the manuscript) toward the end, the initial delight at the sight of the product, fully formed and seemingly perfect, and then the usual postpartum depression. What will people whose opinion I care about, and those whose views I don't value but have weight in the world of reader, think of it? — Doris Grumbach

As a writer, I was deliberately creating an alternate world, and then populating it with experiences and people that I knew in this world, but I'd shake up the mix considerably. And about the same time that the memoir was becoming the dominant popular literary form in the mid to late 90s, I started reading writers who were deliberately playing with the notion of "truth" and "fiction" - that struck me as a much more interesting way to tell certain stories, particularly in the realm of comedy. — Kevin Keck

To paraphrase science writer John D. Barrow ... we know they are impossible and yet we can imagine them anyway. Our brains, it turns out, are not prisoners of the world we live in; we can fly free! We can, any time we like, create the impossible. — Robert Krulwich

Writing is the dragon that lives underneath my floorboards. The one I incessantly feed for fear it may turn and devour my ass. Writing is the friend who doesn't return my phone calls; the itch I'm unable to scratch; a dinner invitation from a cannibal; elevator music for a narcoleptic. Writing is the hope of lifting all boats by pissing in the ocean. Writing isn't something that makes me happy like a good cup of coffee. It's just something I do because not writing, as I've found, is so much worse. — Quentin R. Bufogle

I've been dreaming about having a press forever, like the '90s. I've always known so many great writers who aren't as connected to the publishing world as they should be, and I have the energy and the enthusiasm to sort of gather and promote people, so I've always thought someday I might embark on a big project like that. — Michelle Tea

And it's great to have all these readers and fans who, for the most part, are very nice people, saying they love the books and the TV show. But there are so many of them and it just doesn't end. Oh, and 'selfies'! If I could clap my hands and burn out every camera phone in the world, I swear I'd do it! — George R R Martin

But writers experience the world and themselves in a unique way. We look for meaning. We see it even when we are not paying attention, which is seldom because, as writers, paying attention is what we do. We are scribes to the ticking of the days, and we have a job to do. We are not at peace unless we are doing it. — Larry Brooks

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

If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless. — Bruce Sterling

My greatest strength as a writer is that I'm a storyteller. But, it was a long, hard struggle for me to make the transition from verbally telling stories to writing them. You'll note I don't dwell on descriptions in my writing, because I'm far more interested in telling the story. There are many better writers in this world, but you'd be hard pressed to find anyone more passionate about stories than I am. — Debbie Macomber

The greatest writers in the world have stolen the greatest Story ever told, time and time again. Christians should recognize this Story and seize the opportunity presented by this towering influence. — Gene C. Fant Jr.

I think that most of the children's writers live in the world that they've created, and their children are kind of phantoms that wander around the edge of it in the world, but actually the children's writers are the children. — A.S. Byatt

Writers live in the world to write the sacred words. — Lailah Gifty Akita

You can't go wrong in choosing anything, and I love people who dodge all the gender-imperative rubbish that society torments us all with. I love the fact that he didn't think heterosexuality resolved anything at all, meaning, I assume, that he didn't think it was enough just to be heterosexual. You read him and you are immediately convinced that the rest of the world is suffering a mass mental illness. I love writers like that. — Morrissey

How could people not believe in magic when the whole world is made of it? — A.D. Posey

Basically, writers write because they have something to say...Everyone has a story in them, writers merely decide to share it with the world... — Virginia Alison

He without inspiration and motivation exists no more in a world full of innovations and inventions! — Darnaya Darice

In the narrative of his third voyage Columbus wrote: "For I believe that the earthly Paradise lies here, which no one can enter except by God's leave." As for the people of this land, Peter Martyr would write as early as 1505: "They seem to live in that golden world of which old writers speak so much, wherein men lived simply and innocently without enforcement of laws, without quarreling, judges, or libels, content only to satisfy nature." Or as the ever present Montaigne would write: "In my opinion, what we actually see in these nations not only surpasses all the pictures which the poets have drawn of the Golden Age, and all their inventions representing the then happy state of mankind, but also the conception and desire of philosophy itself. — Paul Auster

A tweet a day keeps writer's block away. — Buffy Andrews

Next week we have a bunch of horror writers coming from all over the world. That'll be one whole week, fully catered, and pre-paid bar. Those horror writers drink like fshes. Just their beer bill's gonna pay for the upkeep of this place for six months. Motel business is a great business to be in, my boy. — Richard Laymon

After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+ B, a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important part than people; love giving away to deductions and other forms of ideas, style, subject and interest. The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head, from the passion to the idea, from the drama to the denouement. — Jules De Goncourt