Quotes
-
Look, my eyes are not your eyes. You move through me like rain heard from another country. – Ocean Vuong, extract from To my father / To my son
-
‘Writing is the greatest fun I’ve ever had. And I know this with painters, I know this with dancers: if it’s the hardest friggin’ work you’ve ever done, and the most fun you’ve ever had, and you can never resolve that, that’s it. That’s where you should be.’ – Marlon James
-
“If the verb is wrong the sentence is wrong.” – Jeanette Winterson
-
If you are afraid to write it, that’s a good sign. I suppose you know when you’re writing the truth when you’re terrified. – Yrsa Daley- Ward, Bone
-
‘My dad had my mum trapped inside his failing personality, in those four walls. Walls and floors. My mum curled up on the floor.’ – Gwendoline Riley, Cold Water
-
‘And then there’d be tears. More specifically, there’d be sniffing. I couldn’t stand it. All of her crying sounded like singing to me. I thought cruel thoughts like maybe my dad had smacked her in the head once too often. She acted frightened all the time. And there was a petulance in there too, a…
-
“I read a science fiction story a long time ago where these people are exploring space and they finally find this habitable planet – and it turns out to be identical to Earth in every detail. And I thought that was the supreme irony: that they’d originally left to find something better and arrived in…
-
‘A sense of place is so critical in cinema, because you want to go into another world. Every story has its own world, and it’s own feel, and its own mood. So you try and put together all these things-these tiny details-to create that sense of place. It has a lot to do with light…
-
‘He did not seem to know enough about the people in his novel. They did not seem to trust him. They were all named, more or less, all more or less destined, the pattern he wished them to describe was clear to him. But it did not seem clear to them. He could move them…
-
‘Both feared the morning, when the moon and stars would be gone, when this room would be harsh and sorrowful with sunlight, and this bed would be dismantled, waiting for other flesh. Love is expensive, Yves had once said, with his curiously dry wonder. One must put furniture around it, or it goes.’ – James…
-
‘But where do you go to my lovely When you’re alone in your bed Tell me the thoughts that surround you I want to look inside your head’ – Peter Sarstedt, Where Do You Go to My Lovely
-
‘When I reread what I’ve written, I feel like I’m swallowing my own vomit.’ – Clarice Lispector
-
‘But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.’ – James Baldwin, Another Country
-
I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life – Frank O’Hara, extract from Meditations in an emergency
-
“You can’t describe love to someone who hasn’t been in love” – Nina Simone, What happened, Miss Simone?
-
‘The steel suddenly touched her heart. Ah, jealousy, it was jealousy, the cold hand mashing her slowly, squeezing her, diminishing her soul’ – Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart
-
‘But there was still that iron bar in my chest. My lips trembled. Harden myself even more, sink to the bottom, drown in depths of loneliness and the night. Or try to catch his outstretched hand.’ – Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed
-
“I met a woman She had a mouth like yours She knew your life She knew your devils and your deeds And she said, Go to him, stay with him if you can but be prepared to bleed” – Joni Mitchell, A case of you
-
“I used to have religion, did you know that? A long time ago, when I was a little girl… It’s funny, I haven’t thought of church or any of that type stuff for years. But it’s still there, I guess.” She smiled and sighed. “Nothing ever goes away.” – James Baldwin, Another Country
-
‘The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.’ – Annie Dillard (quoted by Austin Kleon, Show Your Work)
-
‘Yes, she felt a perfect animal inside her. The thought of one day setting this animal loose disgusted her. Perhaps for fear of lack of aesthetic. Or dreading a revelation… No, no, she repeated, you mustn’t be afraid to create.’ – Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart