Ideas come from everything.
Alfred Hitchcock
The point is – nothing is wasted. Somewhere along the line, that idea you had two years ago but didn’t know what to do with then will reassert itself when you need it.
Ali Smith
My task is to chronicle those little daily lacerations upon the spirit.
Anthony Trollope
Without desire, you don’t have a story because desire captures what we’re all about.
Bill Gaston
Daily life is always extraordinary when rendered precisely.
Bonnie Friedman
Look for a long time at what pleases you, and longer still at what pains you.
Colette
“Sometimes I try to imagine what happens to characters in books – after the books finish, I mean. […] I love making up stories about people.”
Dodie Smith
Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, and where to find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.
Eudora Welty
The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that doesn’t require his attention.
Flannery O’Connor
A writer lives in a constant state of readiness.
Jeanette Winterson
[Ideas come] with the strangeness of a dream but also the force of memory.
Jeanette Winterson
Ideas have come from the strangest places.
Joyce Carol Oates
I happen to feel that the degree of a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting attitudes she can bring to bear on the same topic.
Lisa Alther
Two things make a story. The net and the air that falls through the net.
Pablo Neruda
To edit your life is to save it, for fiction, for yourself.
Susan Sontag
To be sure, fiction of all kinds has always fed on writers’ lives. Every detail in a work of fiction was once an observation or a memory or a wish, or is a sincere homage to a reality independent of the self.
Susan Sontag
This is what might be called blood-writing – when the search for detail is effortless and uncontrolled as heartbeats
Timothy Findley