It's an important thing and a necessary thing as a writer to always be reaching outside of yourself. They say write what you know. But what you know is rarely enough. You need to know more. But you've got to approach it with a lot of respect and humility. You owe it to the people and experience you're trying to understand. It's not a casual thing. Ben Fountain
Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded...
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F. Scott Fitzgerald
Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a "capacity for clear thought, " able to go from point to point in an orderly...
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James J. Kilpatrick
There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean — hell, I know that.
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Stephen King
Murphy is a writer's best friend, but you have to keep an eye on him, or he'll steal the silver.
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Patricia C. Wrede
Art is too often discounted as a secondary priority. The writer is necessary to society.
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Kayla Rae Whitaker
More Quotes By Ben Fountain
You can deny him, he thought, watching his father across the table. You can hate him, love him, pity him, never speak to or look at him in the eye again, never deign even to be in his crabbed and bitter presence, but you're still...
Why?' He kept asking in his sweetly belling voice, its tone as pure as marbles swirled around a crystal pail. Why him wun up the tree? Why him nest up theah? Why him gadder nuts? Why? Why? Why? And Billy answering every question to the...
So what does it mean for a person to devote himself or herself to, as you put it, “literary reading and thinking”? I would argue this is a person who’s trying to see things for what they are. Who’s interested in distinguishing the truth from...
As if sorrow is the true reality? Without ever putting his mind to it, he's come to believe that loss is the standard trajectory.
..he wonders by what process virtually any discussion about the war seems to profane these ultimate matters of life and death. As if to talk of such things properly we need a mode of speech near the equal of prayer, otherwise just shut, shut your...
