“Somebody said that writers are like otters… Otters, if they do a trick and you give them a fish, the next time they’ll do a better trick or a different trick because they’d already done that one. And writers tend to be otters. Most of us get pretty bored doing the same trick. We’ve done it, so let’s do something different.”
~Neil Gaiman
“Writing is always a process of discovery—I never know the end, or even the events on the next page, until they happen. There’s a constant interplay between the imagining and shaping of the story.”
~Kim Edwards
“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
~E.L. Doctorow
“The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.”
—Raymond Chandler
“When I graduated from high school I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library 3 days a week for 10 years.”
—Ray Bradbury
Our culture is all about comparison, conformity, and control. Don’t give in to that pressure. Creativity isn’t meant to be a mouthpiece for what’s popular. It’s meant to be light—not a mirror. May your art be a voice in the wilderness. May it break through the matrix. Stay true.
~ Allen Arnold on Twitter (@TheStoryofWith)
If we study our own history, we find that we have always been ready to receive the unfortunates from other countries, and though this may seem a generous gesture on our part, we have profited a thousand fold by what they have brought us.
~ Eleanor Roosevelt
“All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.”
—Steve Almond
Maybe you’re standing in a place where the sky and the mountains are very dramatic; the trees have incredible color and the water is vibrant. You have to decide what you want your painting to be about, render that element the most important, and then paint everything else to support it.
~ Scott Christensen in On Distant Ground, about landscape painting
