Quotes from learner tobsha

Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, don't be precious about your first draft, it's an architectural blueprint to a whole building, be your own worst critic, confront your weakness and remember it's a craft.

Intelligence is power; it is the flame behind the spark of intrigue. Find out all the facts and stamp out the fire. Demystify.

Danger is an aphrodisiac.

A man who denies his past is a man who truly denies himself a future, for he refuses to know himself.

Starting a new novel is a little like starting a new relationship -- you have to be prepared to commit for at least three years and put up with the domestic tedium as well as the emotional highs!

This may be the very nature of love, a passion as fickle as the sea, full of certainty when the object of desire is absent, yet dubious when confronted again with the lover's presence.

Love wasn't a piece of music you could play over and over again with different interpretations. It actually needed to be improvised as you went along.

As a reader I like both great characterization and fast moving plots. The challenge is to balance the both and not compromise one for the other.

The novelist is more a marathon runner than long-distance runner and the kind of courage it takes working in such isolation cannot be underestimated. I really respect my fellow writers on this front.

Memory is a great deceiver: it embroiders until naught is left but the glory and the pleasure.

Death strips all men of dignity.

Two bones fell down my chimney and into the bedroom this morning. Hysterical thing to happen to a thriller writer. Murderous ravens perhaps?

I was very fierce and very driven at eighteen. But my basic philosophy I think has stayed the same, I'm still an atheist, I still believe strongly in the power of free will (despite the mysticism in my prose). I don't believe in the notion of a pre-ordained destiny, and I think because of the sudden death of my father at sixteen I learnt then that it is essential to live life to the fullest as it could be snatched away at any second.

Everything flows from God, but we are limited by imposing our human perceptions upon him. Man designs God according to his own image and the image man has of himself is flawed.

You must appreciate that love is the last reason for which a man marries.

It seems to me that women are freed from their responsibilities only when they are merry widows or eccentric old spinsters.

Humiliation scars deeper than the lash.