Janet Fitch Quotes - Page 6

Who can judge another man's suffering?

Let me tell you a few things about regret. There is no end to it. Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?

As an artist, you can never get what you want. What you do never approaches what you want it to be.

There is no God, there is only what you want.

As a person with terrible handwriting, I love the computer. I've waited all my life for the computer.

A book's flaws make it less predictable.

What is a scene? a) A scene starts and ends in one place at one time (the Aristotelian unities of time and place-this stuff goes waaaayyyy back). b) A scene starts in one place emotionally and ends in another place emotionally. Starts angry, ends embarrassed. Starts lovestruck, ends disgusted. c) Something happens in a scene, whereby the character cannot go back to the way things were before. Make sure to finish a scene before you go on to the next. Make something happen.

A person didn’t need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved. But I couldn’t help wanting it. If that was the way I could be loved, to be beautiful, I’d take it

I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, men who made you love them then changed their minds.

This was the life I was going to be living, everybody separated from everybody else, hanging on for a moment only to be washed away.

We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental.

Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.

Being in the library is so addictive for me that I really have to exercise self-control so I can get some writing done at home.

We don't have a unitary society anymore, you know; it's very fragmented. I look up and down my block in Silverlake and there is a different universe in every house.

I took my mother's knife and played johnny johnny johnny on the playhouse floor. I was drunk, stabbed myself every few throws. I held my hand up and there was satisfaction at seeing my blood, the way there was when I saw the red gouges onmy face that people stared at and turned away. They were thinking I was beautiful, but they were wrong, now they could see how ugly and mutilated I was.

What can I say about life? Do I praise it for letting you live, or damn it for allowing the rest?

To make films, you have to have boundless energy; you have to work and play with others really, really well, and I'm really a more contemplative kind of person. I like to sit at home and think, a lot.

Your protagonist is your reader’s portal into the story. The more observant he or she can be, the more vivid will be the world you’re creating. They don’t have to be super-educated, they just have to be mentally active. Keep them looking, thinking, wondering, remembering.

The poets are the standard bearers of language. Their work lives or dies word by word. When I write and can hear a clunky sentence, I try to write up to the poetry that I have recited beforehand.

I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn't write again until I was a senior in college.

If this was a sandalwood pyre she would have thrown herself in and this paper she'd become would have caught fire and she and him could sail away like two birds.

I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

A couple of times, I could have turned a trick. But I didn't want to start. I knew how it would play. When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.

We parked in back and walked down the stairs with their polished brass railings, past the old-fashioned kitchen. We could see the chefs cooking. It smelled like stew, or meat loaf, the way time should smell, solid and nourishing.

The word rattled in my head like rocks in an oatmeal box.