Quotes from Janet Fitch

I write every day, including weekends. For writers, there are no weekends. It's just that your family is around, looking mournful, wondering when you're going to pay attention to them.

My house is modern, but I like my writing room to be old fashioned. I write on a little wooden secretary desk.

Most women experience issues of power and sexuality, but very few women talk about it. There's the threat of the loss of approval.

I felt like time was a great sea, and I was floating on the back of a turtle, and no sails broke the horizon.

Life should always be like this. ... Like lingering over a good meal.

This was the life I was going to be living, everybody separated from everybody else, hanging on for a moment only to be washed away.

I've been depressed many times in my life. But under it all I'm an optimist.

How many people ask you to come share their life?

When you're a little kid, you are small, your life is small - and you're terrifically aware of that. But when you read, you can ride Arabian horses across the desert, you can be a dogsledder.

without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my past was my life.

In our exterior life, we can be only one person. But in our imagination, we can be anyone, anywhere.

I hadn't understood at the time. If sinners were so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why.Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my pastwas my life.

I started writing when I was 21. I was going to become an historian. And then I realized there was more to the world than just the past. I didn't want to spend my life in the library.

I have a hard time with abstractions. I always go to the personal.

For me, I'd rather be the inventive one, and if something doesn't work, I'll go back to the workshop, put it on the bench, and pound on it for awhile.

Their love as a dragonfly, skimming over echo park, stoppin to visit the lotus. Eating dreams and drinking blue sky.

It's such a liability to love another person.

I kept sending out stories and getting rejected.

Use description of landscape to help you establish the emotional tone of the scene. Keep notes of how other authors establish mood and foreshadow events by describing the world around the character.

You can't shape me anymore. I am the uncontrolled element, the random act. I am forward movement in time. You think you can see me? Then tell me, who am I? You don't know.

No matter where I was, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California.

Inside every human being, there is unlimited time and space.

This is what happens when you fall in love. You're looking at a natural disaster.

Dostoevsky was my literary idol for a long time.