Knock hard, life is deaf.
Mimi Parent
Great minds discuss ideas.
Average minds discuss events.
Small minds discuss people.
Eleanor Roosevelt (attributed to)
A good story should have incidents, which defy the probabilities and march just inside the borders of the possible.
John Buchan
Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.
Barbara Kingsolver
A book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us
Franz Kafka
There is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not find in the novel — an intense awareness of human loneliness.
Frank O’Connor
Writing is a strange synthesis between the two parts of your mind: the analytical side and the side that knows nothing at all, and you have to allow the dreaming side free rein.
Rose Tremain
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
William Styron
Don’t ask who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life.
Giorgos Seferis
It’s hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.
Theodore Roosevelt