“I can’t play bridge. I don’t play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn’t seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.”
~ ALICE MUNRO, 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature
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For more quotations from Alice Munro, see:
http://writers-write-creative-blog.posthaven.com/literary-birthday-10-july-alice-munro
“I would imagine that most writers revise, one way or another. Maybe they don’t revise as extensively on paper, but the process of writing is a process of inner expansion and reduction. It’s like an accordion: You open it and then you bring it back, hoping that additional sound – a new clarity – may come out. It’s all for clarity.”
~ JERZY KOSINSKI
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“Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.”
~ TRUMAN CAPOTE, b. 30 September 1924
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“I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.”
~ PETER de VRIES
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“The writer must be a psychologist, but a secret one; he must sense and know the roots of phenomena, but offer only the phenomena themselves as they blossom or wither.”
~ IVAN TURGENEV
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“There’s something magical about writing. In my own experience, nothing is harder for the developing writer than overcoming his anxiety that he is fooling himself and cheating or embarrassing his family and friends. To most people, even those who don’t read much, there is something special and vaguely magical about writing, and it is not easy for them to believe that someone they know — someone quite ordinary in many respects — can really do it.”
~ JOHN GARDNER
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“The life of a writer is absolute hell. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.”
~ Roald Dahl, b. 13 September 1916
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“As a writer one doesn’t belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn’t belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.”
~ WILLIAM TREVOR
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“Pace is crucial. Fine writing isn’t enough. Writing students can be great at producing a single page of well-crafted prose; what they sometimes lack is the ability to take the reader on a journey, with all the changes of terrain, speed and mood that a long journey involves. Again, I find that looking at films can help. Most novels will want to move close, linger, move back, move on, in pretty cinematic ways.”
~ SARAH WATERS
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“Tragedy is like strong acid – it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.”
~ D.H. Lawrence. b. 11 September 1885
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Sextile 