All human beings have a sickness in their minds. That space is a part of them. We have a sane part of our minds and an insane part. We negotiate between those two parts; that is my belief. I can see the insane part of my mind especially well when I’m writing—insane is not the right word. Unordinary, unreal. I have to go back to the real world, of course, and pick up the sane part. But if didn’t have the insane part, the sick part, I wouldn’t be here.
— Haruki Murakami
It wasn’t until my second reading of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, over a decade after it first had been assigned to me by my public high school English teacher, that I understood that Jake’s dick didn’t work.
— Natasha Vargas-Cooper
Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties.
— Bonnie Friedman
When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.
~ Virginia Woolf
“I’d love to see more books where the characters get together earlier in the story. While the yearning portions of books are lovely and make us flip their pages, I’d love to see more stories where healthy romantic relationships are depicted. Where the curtain isn’t dropped with the suggestion of coupling up = happily ever after.”
–Tiffany Schmidt, guest post on stacked
Am very ashamed not to have written. Was over-run by journalists, photographers and plain and fancy crazies. Was in the middle of writing a book and it is a little like being interrupted in fornication.
~ Hemingway, Selected Letters
Don Quixote’s misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.
~ Franz Kafka
“I think one of the first obstacles you have to get past is trying too hard: at sounding smart, at pretention, at making it high-brow. Say something exactly as it is first, and then describe something else. Keep Going.”
— Lia Cooper
“The heart lies to itself because it must.”
— Jack Gilbert
“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
— Franz Kafka