Quotes About Reflection

realizes a huge metal tray cart has overturned. The floor is piled with plastic trays and debris. The moment of shock evaporates. People help the cafeteria workers pull the cart upright and slide trays back into the racks. Last night's shotgun blast tramples through Adrian's thoughts. The

A writer must learn to be comfortable with buried, shadowy currents deep in the mind, those that form dreams & make hidden connections.

Childhood is what you spend the rest of your life trying to overcome …

A writer's fiefdom is the entire world--everything seen, heard, felt & thought--all augmented by imagination.

As a writer, you write about the world as you see it, and about yourself in disguise.

You can't just shove the past aside. It stays with you, whether you want to acknowledge it or not.

Without conflict, there is no story. Without a story, there is no novel--only the author's self-indulgent musings.

You are what you read. You write what you are.

A good novel is an intensely personal rendezvous between reader and writer.

Downer: When the searing prose of the night before reads so bleakly pedestrian in the cold light of morning

A good novel appeals to emotions, not intellect. It makes you feel things deeply, and then you think about them.

When you walk, cherish the silence. Let your mind wander. The child within picks up crayons & begins to write.

First draft, use your heart. Revision, use your head

Writing is a way of remaking the world, both for the writer and reader.

You know you've been writing from the heart when, in the midst of a story, you ask, 'What would my mother think of this?

Everything you do, everything you'll ever accomplish, your life's work, your kids' life's work: horseshit. (Ecclesiastes) [God Is Disappointed in You]

My writing is how I maintain.

Sometimes I wish I could put my whole life on pause...just make everything stop for a while so I can figure shit out.

As Mark Twain observed, "Genuine humor is replete with wisdom.

Life isn't simple. Literature shouldn't be either.

The only thing your life teaches you is how to live your life. And that's only if you're very lucky. And you listen very hard.

like a small stone deflected off a larger one, my brother had spun off toward the Almighty, though to my mind the events of that morning could just as well have cast him the other way.

Literature is literature. Its purpose is to challenge and disorient us, to break us down a little bit so that we are forced to rebuild ourselves. Over time, over the course of many books, we construct a deeper, truer self.

Now and then I'd catch my mother looking at my like she was thinking about her life, like she was about to say something, but she never did. I didn't expect it. Sometimes it's better not to go back--just settle accounts as they are, call it even.