All Quotes By Tag: Writing

“A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.”

“Characters who simply have goals opposed by others do not create the effects of a story.”

“Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing.”

“How can so many (white, male) writers narratively justify restricting the agency of their female characters on the grounds of sexism = authenticity while simultaneously writing male characters with conveniently modern values?The habit of authors writing Sexism Without Sexists in genre novels is seemingly pathological. Women are stuffed in the fridge under cover of “authenticity” by secondary characters and villains because too many authors flinch from the “authenticity” of sexist male protagonists. Which means the yardstick for “authenticity” in such novels almost always ends up being “how much do the women suffer”, instead of – as might also be the case – “how sexist are the heroes”.And this bugs me; because if authors can stretch their imaginations far enough to envisage the presence of modern-minded men in the fake Middle Ages, then why can’t they stretch them that little bit further to put in modern-minded women, or modern-minded social values? It strikes me as being extremely convenient that the one universally permitted exception to this species of “authenticity” is one that makes the male heroes look noble while still mandating that the women be downtrodden and in need of rescuing.-Comment at Staffer’s Book Review 4/18/2012 to “Michael J. Sullivan on Character Agency ”

“The hard part is putting one word after another.”

“The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not.”

“The cry that ‘fantasy is escapist’ compared to the novel is only an echo of the older cry that novels are ‘escapist’ compared with biography, and to both cries one should make the same answer: that freedom to invent outweighs loyalty to mere happenstance, the accidents of history; and good readers should know how to filter a general applicability from a particular story.”

“No book can be written till it wants to be written, till it shouts to be written, and raises up a persistent din in the writer’s head. And then, if you want peace, you just have to pull it out and freeze it in print. Nothing less would do.”

“Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.”

“The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you.”

“If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.”

“I write because, if I don’t, my characters will murder me in my sleep.”

“Fact is just fiction with different storytellers”

“Write to amuse? What an appalling suggestion! I write to make people anxious and miserable and to worsen their indigestion.”

“By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.”