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“I guess you can call me "old fashioned". I prefer the book with the pages that you can actually turn. Sure, I may have to lick the tip of my fingers so that the pages don't stick together when I'm enraptured in a story that I can't wait to get to the next page. But nothing beats the sound that an actual, physical book makes when you first crack it open or the smell of new, fresh printed words on the creamy white paper of a page turner.”
― Felicia Johnson

“Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“The Cool Stuff Theory of Literature is as follows: All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool. And that works all the way from the external trappings to the level of metaphor, subtext, and the way one uses words. In other words, I happen not to think that full-plate armor and great big honking greatswords are cool. I don't like 'em. I like cloaks and rapiers. So I write stories with a lot of cloaks and rapiers in 'em, 'cause that's cool. Guys who like military hardware, who think advanced military hardware is cool, are not gonna jump all over my books, because they have other ideas about what's cool.

The novel should be understood as a structure built to accommodate the greatest possible amount of cool stuff.”
― Steven Brust

“Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Life is'nt about getting everything you want the instant you want it.Some thing are worth waiting for.”
― Mira Lyn Kelly, Waking Up Married

“A freedom given up is not so easily regained.”
― Rivera Sun, Steam Drills, Treadmills and Shooting Stars - a story of our times -

“Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“A Dickens character to me is a theatrical projection of a character. Not that it isn't real. It's real, but in that removed sense. But Sherlock Holmes is simply there. I would be astonished if I went to 221 1/2 B Baker Street and didn't find him."

[An Invitation to Learning, January 1942]”
― Rex Stout

“The clock ticks; the taunting rhythm serving as a reminder that forward is the only way we can go. The mechanical heartbeat of the darkness, a cold ellipsis, punctuating years gone by.

Arising unchained.

No glorious hymn, just the steady beat of the illusion of time. We heal or we carry forward the weight of our wounds... To believe otherwise is the mendacity of desperation.

Arising honestly.

The miles behind are littered with the weight of nostalgia, but too many miles lay ahead us to carry the weight. In the end, even echoes fade away.

Pen in hand...

Arising to write the next chapter.

(MU Articles 2013, Dedication to Joey)”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren't they?”
― John Irving, In One Person

“It takes three or four years before the present day sinks in to you as a novelist. It has not just to be accepted in the mind but travel down your spine and fill your body and you can’t respond immediately to immediate events, there is this incubation period.

Source: ”
― Martin Amis

“[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art--novels, poems, plays, paintings or films--can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world.”
― Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

“What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.”
― Julian Barnes

“Science Fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story. In it, as in all fiction, there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things, there is time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them, too, and sing to little Oom, and listen to Ool's joke, and watch newts, and still the story isn't over. Still there are seeds to be gathered and room in the bag of stars.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“العشاق لا يرون، لا يعون الأمور التي لا تتوافق مع ما يريدون الوصول إليه، لا يعترفون بأي شيء يثنيهم عن الوصول إلى هدفهم”
― لطيفة الحاج, أكتب لي شيئا

“Well, Mr Thomas, while I'm in favour of education, I couldn't in good conscience recommend a university career in anything but the hard sciences. As a working environment, the rest of academia is a sewer of irrationality, hate mongering, envy, and self-interest. I'm getting out the moment I earn my twenty-five-year pension package, and then I'm going to write novels...”
― Dean Koontz, Odd Thomas

“What we can imagine we can make real”
― Nadine May, The Awakening Clan

“The true magic of novels dwells within us individually. Each reader will interpret every single character, scene, and metaphor in a slightly different way”
― Carl Henegan, Darkness Left Undone

“Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.”
― Ralph Ellison, The Collected Essays

“Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep �� it can't be done abruptly."

[Colm Tóibín, Novelist �� Portrait of the Artist, The Guardian, 19 February 2013]”
― Colm Tóibín

“They (the novelists) became the voice of the citizen against the ubiquitous raison d'état, which reappeared endlessly to justify everything from unjust laws and the use of child labour to incompetent generalship and inhuman conditions on warships.
The themes they popularized have gradually turned into the laws which, for all their flaws, have improved the state of man.”
― John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West

“A mysterious ability, a broken promise, a life changed forever...”
― Kim Hornsby, The Dream Jumper's Promise

“Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a few pictures and statues and pieces of music, short stories and short poems. Whether or not you expect perfection from them, you get it; at least, there is nothing in them that you would want changed. But what Ruskin says is true about novels: anyone who expects perfection from even the greatest novel knows nothing of novels.”
― Randall Jarrell, No Other Book: Selected Essays

“The only time I've ever learned anything from a review was when John Lanchester wrote a piece in the Guardian about my second novel, The Heather Blazing. He said that, together with the previous novel, it represented a diptych about the aftermath of Irish independence. I simply hadn't known that �� and I loved the grandeur of the word "diptych". I went around quite snooty for a few days, thinking: "I wrote a diptych."

[Colm Tóibín, Novelist �� Portrait of the Artist, The Guardian, 19 February 2013]”
― Colm Tóibín

“The magic in writing is not so much using your imagination as it is allowing the reader to uses theirs. When I write a novel I’m not going to hand walk you through each scene. Avid readers tend to have very high IQ’s so I’m constantly aware of, and respect that. I have a tendency to give my readers vivid descriptions of panoramic viewpoints, soft breezes, and the late evening as it scrapes against the emerging night and present this step by suspenseful step. Once I get them to the threshold of that unseen cliff, I shove them off and say, take it from there.”
― Carl Henegan, Darkness Left Undone

“Sometimes you can write about a character's day in under a minute and sometimes it takes a day just to write about a minute.”
― Jennifer v Clancy

“If the shining sun blinds the eye,it makes sense. But to be blinded by gold and silver!”
― I.R. Shankar

“Ideas are cheap. Writing them into a freakin' 90k word novel is the hard part.”
― Ellie Ann

“Fiction in general holds little interest for me. Novels, in particular, arouse more suspicion than intrigue. It truly baffles me that any practitioner of make-believe should (especially in this day and age) feel the need to produce anything so gratuitous. The fact that certain examples of this fare can approach the length of your average dictionary seems inherently absurd.”
― Dan Garfat-Pratt, Citations: A Brief Anthology

“Thinking back on the outing to the theatre, she added, ‘I want a man, not a preening peacock!”
― Katherine Givens, In Her Dreams