Gillian Church > Gillian's Quotes

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
― Ira Glass

“I’d barely worn it out. Life had been a suit I’d only put on for special occasions. Most of the time I kept it in the back of my closet, forgetting it was there. We were meant to die when it was barely stitched anymore, when the elbows and knees were stained with grass and mud, shoulder pads uneven from people hugging you all the time, downpours and blistering sun, the fabric faded, buttons gone.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“Eleanor looked up, surprised; the little girl was sliding back in her chair, sullenly refusing her milk, while her father frowned and her brother giggled and her mother said calmly, 'She wants her cup of stars.'

Indeed yes, Eleanor thought; indeed, so do I; a cup of stars, of course.

'Her little cup,' the mother was explaining, smiling apologetically at the waitress, who was thunderstruck at the thought that the mill's good country milk was not rich enough for the little girl. 'It has stars in the bottom, and she always drinks her milk from it at home. She calls it her cup of stars because she can see the stars while she drinks her milk.' The waitress nodded, unconvinced, and the mother told the little girl, 'You'll have your milk from your cup of stars tonight when we get home. But just for now, just to be a very good little girl, will you take a little milk from this glass?'

Don't do it, Eleanor told the little girl; insist on your cup of stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone else you will never see your cup of stars again; don't do it; and the little girl glanced at her, and smiled a little subtle, dimpling, wholly comprehending smile, and shook her head stubbornly at the glass. Brave girl, Eleanor thought; wise, brave girl.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“On the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. On the moon we had gold spoons.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“I can't help it when people are frightened," says Merricat. "I always want to frighten them more.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“There had not been this many words sounded in our house for a long time, and it was going to take a while to clean them out.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer. Then, child, make another.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.”
― Tim O'Brien

“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
― Albert Camus

“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.”
― John Cheever

“There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.”
― Doris May Lessing, Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949

“Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.”
― Khaled Hosseini

“While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.”
― Tim O'Brien

“Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it."

[Q&A with Larry McCaffery, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2]”
― David Foster Wallace

“There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life”
― Martin Amis, Essays

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
― Anais Nin

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
― Anais Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ”
― Anais Nin

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
― Anais Nin

“Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”
― Anais Nin

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.”
― Anais Nin

“Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.”
― Anaïs Nin, HENRY AND JUNE

“You don't find love, it finds you. It's got a little bit to do with destiny, fate, and what's written in the stars.”
― Anaïs Nin