Category Archives: Quotations

We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. ~Lynda Barry

[F]or the practicing artist influence requires a more active engagement. We must work to be influenced, not merely wait. ~ Margot Livesay

You have to finish things — you learn by finishing things. ~Neil Gaiman

Is it fiction? Is it interesting? Will the reader want to begin the story? Will the reader want to finish the story? Is the author’s discipline evident in the editing? Is it a finished product? ~Unknown

If the writing is unclear, we’ll read it a second time and make it clear to ourselves and then let the writer off the hook, when, in fact, the writing has to stand for itself . . .  You want … Continue reading →

[It] does what we expect the work of our best writers to do: reflect our world from a surprising perspective so that we might better see its beauty and contradictions, it comforts and aches. ~Paul Temblay

Fiction is the art form of human yearning. That is absolutely essential to any work of fictional narrative art—a character who yearns. And that is not the same as a character who simply has problems. . . . The yearning … Continue reading →

To describe the world more fully is to change it. To let the world go undescribed is, in some way, not to know it, at one’s own peril. ~Elif Batumann

A true work of fiction does all of the following things, and does them elegantly, efficiently: it creates a vivid and continuous dream in the reader’s mind; it is implicitly philosophical; it fulfills or at least deals with all of … Continue reading →

Creole began to tell us what the blues are all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to … Continue reading →