A.F. Zoelle > A.F.'s Quotes

“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon

“We will do an awful lot for stories—we will endure an awful lot for stories. And stories, in their turn—like some kind of symbiote—help us endure and make sense of our lives.”
― Neil Gaiman

“I adore the way fan fiction writers engage with and critique source texts, by manipulating them and breaking their rules. Some of it is straight-up homage, but a lot of [fan fiction] is really aggressive towards the source text. One tends to think of it as written by total fanboys and fangirls as a kind of worshipful act, but a lot of times you’ll read these stories and it’ll be like ‘What if Star Trek had an openly gay character on the bridge?’ And of course the point is that they don’t, and they wouldn’t, because they don’t have the balls, or they are beholden to their advertisers, or whatever. There’s a powerful critique, almost punk-like anger, being expressed there—which I find fascinating and interesting and cool.”
― Lev Grossman

“Treat all your secondary characters like they think the book’s about them.”
― Jocelyn Hughes

“A writer is a world trapped in a person.”
― Victor Hugo

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You

“You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.”
― Jodi Picoult

“The best way to know life is to love many things”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy because they know what it’s like to feel absolutely worthless and they don’t want anyone else to feel like that.”
― Robin Williams

“Sometimes people put up walls, not to keep others out, but to see who cares enough to break them down.”
― Banana Yoshimoto