Samuel Johnson Quotes

When writing about historical characters I try to be as accurate as possible, and in particular not to misrepresent the view they held. With a real historical figure you have to be fair, and this is not an obligation you have in dealing with your own creations, so it is quite different.

Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent.

I made commercials for corporations like Volkswagen and Coca-Cola, but I was always the one to write them, too, which was a very good exercise, because I learned to tell little stories.

Sure, sis!' Then he raised his hands in a stop everything gesture. 'I feel a haiku coming on.

The State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime... It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien.

History may never have all the facts, but history always has the last word.

It is good walking when one hath his horse in hand.

A lot of time, with stories, I'll start out with a title and try to dream myself into the story that it evokes - a kind of subconscious exercise in which I'm trawling for some kind of entryway into fiction.

I don't ask my students to have studied film or any education in general. What I ask them is to come and sit and tell me a story, and the way they choose it and tell it, for me, the best criteria for whether they are right for making films. There's nothing more important than being able to tell your story orally.

A thump thump thump noise that was so unfamiliar, and yet I couldn't quite place it. But I knew it. It was - "Mmm-hmmm," Monica murmured, just as Wes came view into the path. He was running, his pace quick and steady. He was in shorts, his shirt off, staring ahead as he passed. His back was tan and gleaming with sweat.

I don't think I've ever held a racket in my hand ... There's got to be somebody in the US who isn't trying to play tennis and stinking up the court.

To invent a story, or admirably and thoroughly tell any part of a story, it is necessary to grasp the entire mind of every personage concerned in it, and know precisely how they would be affected by what happens; which to do requires a colossal intellect: but to describe a separate emotion delicately, it is only needed that one should feel it oneself; and thousands of people are capable of feeling this or that noble emotion, for one who is able to enter into all the feelings of someone sitting on the other side of the table.

To survive, each sentence must have, at its heart, a little spark of fire, and this, whatever the risk, the novelist must pluck with his own hands from the blaze.

I write my first draft by hand, at least for fiction. For non-fiction, I write happily on a computer, but for fiction I write by hand, because I'm trying to achieve a kind of thoughtless state, or an unconscious instinctive state. I'm not reading what I write when I wrote. It's an unconscious outpouring that's a mess, and it's many, many steps away from anything anyone would want to read. Creating that way seems to generate the most interesting material for me to work with, though.

Young authors give their brains much exercise and little food.

The facts of history have been too well rehearsed.

God made the human body, and it is the most exquisite and wonderful organization which has come to us from the divine hand.

The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.

When anything important has to be written ... I think your hand concentrates for you.

The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.

Being a singer, being a performer, you have tricks, somehow, to calm yourself when things feel a little overwhelming. I don't do breathing exercises, per se, but I definitely have to have a sort of internal word with myself before things got completely out of hand and I fainted on the floor.

Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.

The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and rain with verbs.

Writing fiction is an act of imagination and fantasizing, and it's not relating in prose what you've been doing for the last two or three years.

These are rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what's taking place in the story.