Jay Daze > Jay's Quotes

“Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.”
― Marcel Proust, The Captive / The Fugitive

“For it is characteristic of true simplicity that there may radiate from its utmost directness a good many glinting things.”
― Christopher Ricks

“But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.”
― Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

“Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
― Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

“God, how I still love private readers. It’s what we all used to be. ”
― J.D. Salinger

“...the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.”
― Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

“It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Cocktail Time

“The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part, and if he found that after a strong first act he had practically nothing to do in the second act, he would walk out. Now, then, can I twist the story so as to give him plenty to do all the way through? I believe the only way a writer can keep himself up to the mark is by examining each story quite coldly before he starts writing it and asking himself it is all right as a story. I mean, once you go saying to yourself, "This is a pretty weak plot as it stands, but if I'm such a hell of a writer that my magic touch will make it okay," you're sunk. If they aren't in interesting situations, characters can't be major characters, not even if you have the rest of the troop talk their heads off about them."

(Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975)”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”
― Jessamyn West

“I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.”
― Flannery O'Connor