GiGi > GiGi's Quotes

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
― Mark Twain

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”
― Lloyd Alexander

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”
― Louis L'Amour

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.”
― Guy de Maupassant

“Shut your eyes and see.”
― James Joyce

“Forever is composed of nows.”
― Emily Dickinson

“I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.”
― Edna O'Brien, A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories

“If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“If through a broken heart God can bring His purposes to pass in the world, then thank Him for breaking your heart.”
― Oswald Chambers

“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories...And those that carry us forward, are dreams.”
― H.G. Wells

“I am a part of all that I have met.”
― Alfred Tennyson, The Complete Poetical Works of Tennyson

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“How strange it is, to be standing leaning against the current of time.”
― W.G. Sebald

“Writing is learning to say nothing, more cleverly each day.”
― William Allingham

“Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.”
― Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses

“If you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything.”
― Kathy Acker

“There are some works so luminous...so powerful that they give us strength, and force us to new undertakings. A book can play this role.”
― Hervé Le Tellier

“Nothing can last forever. There isn't any memory, no matter how intense, that doesn't fade out at last.”
― Juan Rulfo

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“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

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country