Ray

“I don’t know any creators of fictions who start writing with nothing but a blank page. (They may exist. I just haven’t met any.) Mostly you have something. An image, or a character. And mostly you also have either a beginning, a middle or an end. Middles are good to have, because by the time you reach the middle you have a pretty good head of steam up; and ends are great. If you know how it ends, you can just start somewhere, aim, and begin to write (and, if you’re lucky, it may even end where you were hoping to go). There may be writers who have beginnings, middles and ends before they sit down to write. I am rarely of their number.”
― Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Non-Fiction

“She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls. You must not complain, then, if she goes hunting.”
― Alan Garner, The Owl Service

“The job of a storyteller is to speak the truth. But what we feel most deeply can’t be spoken in words alone. At this level, only images connect. And here, story becomes symbol; symbol is myth. And myth is truth.”
― Alan Garner

“He also said, "I suppose there are people who are so `lucky' that they are not touched by phantoms and are not troubled by fleeting memory and know not nostalgia and care not for the ache of the past and are spared the feather-hit of the sweet, sweet pain of the lost, and I am sorry for them-for to weep over what is gone is to have had something prove worth the weeping.”
― Isaac Asimov, It's Been a Good Life