Quotes About Engagement

And you, CONSTANT READER. Thank God you're still there after all these years. If you're having fun, I am, too.

Do the day and let the day do you.

A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. You prime a pump with your own water, you work the handle with your own strength. You do this because you expect to get back more than you give.

The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.

What you need to remember is that there's a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story. The latter is good. The former is not.

Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story  . . . . to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.

maybe the world needs a cadre of smartasses to liven things up, who knows?

Eighty percent of success is just showing up.

C-C-Can you get bones in your buh-buh-brain?' Bill asked. This was turning into the most interesting conversation he'd had in weeks.

Stories take a person away. If they're good ones, that is.

Strap it on whenever it's possible.

A successful novel should interrupt the reader's life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog.

For me, that emotional payoff is what it's all about. I want you to laugh or cry when you read a story...or do both at the same time. I want your heart, in other words. If you want to learn something, go to school.

If something got you to turn off T.V. , it's a total success

Any battle-seasoned general will tell you that, even in a small-scale engagement (as this one was), there always comes a point where coherence breaks down, and the narrative flow, and any real sense of how things are going. These matters are re-created by historians later on. The need to re-create the myth of coherence may be one of the reasons why history exists in the first place.

When I was writing, I forgot to be sad. I forgot to worry about the future. I forgot where I was. I didn't know that could happen. I

Story is something happening to someone you have been led to care about.

Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's. When it comes to actually pulling this off, the writer is much more fortunate than the filmmaker, who is almost always doomed to show too much  . . . . including, in nine cases out of ten, the zipper running up the monster's back.

Even after a thousand pages we don't want to leave the world the writer has made for us, or the make-believe people who live there.

Ladies and gentlemen, attention, please! Come in close where everyone can see! I got a tale to tell, it isn't gonna cost a dime! (And if you believe that, we're gonna get along just fine.)

When I bore you, just tell me to shut up, I won't be offended.' 'I like to listen,' Stu said. 'Then you are one of God's chosen. Let's go.

The most important things to remember about backstory are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn't very interesting. Stick to the parts that are, and don't get carried away with the rest. Life stories are best received in bars, and only then an hour or so before closing time, and if you are buying.

la buena literatura podía ser embriagadora sin renunciar al hilo conductor de las ideas.

Woody Allen was right: eighty percent of success is just showing up.