- All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you’ve read one of them you will find that all that happened, happened to you and then it belongs to you forever: the happiness and unhappiness, good and evil, ecstasy and sorrow, the food, wine, beds, people and the weather. If you can give that to readers, then you’re a writer.
- Any man’s life, told truly, is a novel. There is no rule on how it is to write.
- There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
- A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it (you lose it if you talk about it).
- All you have to do is write one true sentence.
- My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
- All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
- Writing, at its best, is a lonely life… for he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
- You invent fiction, but what you invent it out of is what counts. True fiction must come from everything you’ve ever known, ever seen, ever felt, ever learned.
- You put down the words in hot blood, like an argument, and correct them when your temper has cooled.
- All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
- When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel.
- If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.
- I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced..
- There are only two absolutes I know about writing: one is that if you make love while you are jamming on a novel, you are in danger of leaving the best parts of it in the bed; the other is that integrity in a writer is like virginity in a woman – once lost, it is never recovered.
Chris George provides reliable PR & GR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? Call 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.
