Janet Burroway Quotes
Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.
The human desire to know why is as powerful as the desire to know what happened next, and it is a desire of a higher order.
The only justification for writing a novel is that it should be wonderful. Adequate is inadequate.
What matters is not publication or success (success is bad for your prose) but the practice of the imaginative act. Our damaged values depend on it.
The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of rearing and peering from the bent tip of a grass blade, looking for a route.
Part of the trouble is that I've never properly understood that some disasters accumulate, that they don't all land like a child out of an apple tree.
I sit and pass judgment on myself: this is dull, this is unclear, this is insignificant: ergo I am dull, I am unclear, I am insignificant.
If character is the foreground of fiction, setting is the background, and as in a painting's composition, the foreground may be in harmony or in conflict with the background.
