Book Goddess > Book Goddess's Quotes

“Most journals are repositories of great swatches of abstraction and generalization and self-analysis and interpretation and all that bad stuff. Don’t do that. But here’s a certain kind of journal that might be useful to you: at the end of the day or beginning of the next day, return to some event of the day that evoked an emotion in you. Record that event in the journal. But do this only—only—moment to moment through the senses. Absolutely never name an emotion; never start explaining or analyzing or interpreting an emotion. Record only through those five ways I mentioned that we feel emotions—signals inside the body, signals outside the body, flashes of the past, flashes of the future, sensual selectivity—which are therefore the best ways to express emotions.”
― Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

“PLAYBOY: You are a feminist and yet you have written explicit sexual fantasies. How do you reconcile those two things?

ANN RICE: I believe absolutely in the right of women to fantasize what they want to fantasize, to read what they want to read. I would go to the Supreme Court to fight for the right of a little woman in a trailer park to read pornography - write it, if she wants to. I think one of the worst turns feminism took was its puritanical turn, where it tried to tell women what was politically correct sexually. I mean, we had that for thousands of years. I got that from the nuns at school: what you were supposed to feel as a temple of the Holy Ghost, what you were supposed to allow. And to hear the feminists then telling me that having masochistic fantasies or rape fantasies just isn't politically correct, I just thought, Oh bullshit, you're not going to come in and politicize my imagination.”
― Ann Rice

“The single most important piece of advice I ever got was to concentrate on story. What is "story? "It's the quality that keeps the reader following the narrative. A good story makes interesting things happen to a character...And it keeps them happening, so that the character progresses and grows in stature.

A writer's job is to do whatever is necessary to make the reader want to read the next line. That's what you're supposed to be thinking about when you write a story...don't waste your energy on anything else.”
― Frank Herbert

“And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It's good for you.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night