Beth Cato > Beth's Quotes

“I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.”
― Barbara Kingsolver

“Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Missing people in our lives are like wounds we reopen with thoughts.”
― Kevin Hearne, Hunted

“Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Whenever I'm with other people, part of me shrinks a little. Only when I am alone can I fully enjoy my own company.”
― Alan Bradley, A Red Herring Without Mustard

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

“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of. ”
― Joss Whedon

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

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

“Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.”
― Ted Chiang

“I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.”
― Shannon Hale

“While writing is like a joyful release, editing is a prison where the bars are my former intentions and the abusive warden my own neuroticism.”
― Tiffany Madison

“For all my longer works (i.e. the novels) I write chapter outlines so I can have the pleasure of departing from them later on.”
― Garth Nix

“In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can't be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Jewel Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction

“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.”
― Frank Herbert

“When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.”
― John Muir

“When we tug at a single thing in nature, we find it attached to the rest of the world.”
― John Muir

“Writing is like the life of a glacier; one eternal grind.”
― John Muir

“Facts are the soil from which the story grows. Imagination is a last resort.”
― Dorothy Dunnett

“London isn't a place at all. It's a million little places.”
― Bill Bryson, The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain

“The pleasant fact is that the British are not much good at violent crime except in fiction, which is of course as it should be.”
― Bill Bryson, The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain