Quotes About Exploration

Whether it's fiction or nonfiction, writing takes me to another world.

Through my writing, I have made new friends and continued to learn about this world of ours in all its wonder, with all its challenges.

There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.

I couldn't wait to get out of school, but once I did, I didn't actually know what I wanted to do with myself. I don't really know how it happened, but I just started writing music and realized that's what I wanted to do.

Writing is very much a playground - an artistic playground. It's the most fun thing I do.

When I was 18, I took a trip to Thailand with a friend. We stayed for a month. Bangkok was very raw for a teenager: there were no cellphones, no Internet, and the only music I had with me was this cassette by Liz Phair. I was writing a lot of poetry, and she embodied a talky style of songwriting that I found very accessible.

The day the producers aren't minting money, or the fans are done with me and, most of all, I as a person get bored of acting, I will stop and pursue my other interests. There is a lot to do: painting, writing, direction.

I like the idea that every page in every book can have a gem on it. It's probably what I love most about writing - that words can be used in a way that's like a child playing in a sandpit, rearranging things, swapping them around.

If I can keep losing myself - and finding parts of myself - in other people's writing and direction, then that's all I can really ask for. That's all I want, to keep losing myself.

When you think about archaeology, archaeology is the only field that allows us to tell the story of 99 percent of our history prior to 3,000 B.C. and writing.

I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie. I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.

Good writing is often about trying to investigate something you feel is missing and trying to put it back.

You know, the process of making a documentary is one of discovery, and like writing a story, you follow a lead and that leads you to something else and then by the time you finish, the story is nothing like you expected.

Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.

And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.

He didn't remember that a mere book might reek of sex, possibility, fecundity. Yet a book has a ripe furrow and a yielding spine, he thought, and the nuances to be teased from its pages are nearly infinite in their variety and coquettish appeal. And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.

Marmalade has to make its own way in life, like the rest of us, she thought.

Books fall open, you fall in. When you climb out again, you're a bit larger than you used to be. ? Gregory Maguire

The overdressed traveller betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing, while the true traveller knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accessory.

He set out once more, with a sense that his life would be rich in setting outs, and perhaps poorer in homecomings.

I'm learning there's never a way home, only a way forward,' said Rain.

I wouldn't mind leaving myself behind if I could, buy I don't know the way out.

You can't criticize the size of a world.

The person who would become a lifelong reader should stumble upon very rich stuff first, early, and often. It lived within, a most agreeable kind of haunting.