Trying Quotes - Page 642

I am trying to remember that things have certainly been crazier in human history and they may get crazier here and now, and [here I am trying to be optimistic] it's even a good thing, to be going through all of this, if only to be reminded that history hasn't stopped - human existence is as fundamentally unmanageable now as it ever was.

The writer has to make pleasure for the reader - which, I think, is done by taking one's character's seriously and taking one's readers seriously -don't condescend or try to be tricky. Be a friend to your reader - I'd say that's a pretty good first step.

The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull - to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.

I have a lot of theories about the beneficial effects of fiction, but I'm always trying to get away from them a little bit.

When somebody you've known for 20 years, and with whom you have a full context, winks at you or whatever, it can be huge. I think in a sense what you're trying to re-create in fiction is that.

I know that my only chance at any kind of depth or profundity is to linger within the story, trying to make it distinguish itself.

As a writer I'm essentially just trying to impersonate a first-time reader, who picks up the story and has to decide, at every point, whether to keep going.

Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible.

I've seen time and time again the way that the process of trying to say something dignifies and improves a person.

I came to writing kind of late. I was an engineer, and the one thing I've learned is that you have to steer a project in the direction of the maximum fun for you. You could say lively energy, or you have to try to be intrigued. Basically, if you were a musician and you were playing joylessly, nobody would want to hear you.

So for me the approach has become to go into a story not really sure of what I want to say, try to find some little seed crystal of interest, a sentence or an image or an idea, and as much as possible divest myself of any deep ideas about it. And then by this process of revision, mysteriously it starts to accrete meanings as you go.

If you at least try to do the things that excite you, it will make you a more expansive and present person - you’ll feel, at the end of your life, that at least you took the shot.

I can see a scene in my head, and when I try to get it down in words on paper, the words are clunky; the scene is not coming across right. So frustrating. And there are days where it keeps flowing. Open the floodgates, and there it is. Pages and pages coming. Where the hell does this all come from? I don't know.

I wrote six pilots, none of which ever got picked up. When you stop trying, it then it falls in your lap.

Start trying to work out who deserves what, and before long you'll spend the rest of your days weeping for each and every person in the world.

I heard of a man who had a razor made of Valyrian steel. He cut his head off trying to shave.

I'm proud to be a crime novelist. What I've chosen is the best way to convey the questions I'm trying to raise.

A nobleness to try for, A name to live and die for.

I think it's important for Americans to try to understand each other a little better.

There are those who are trying to create an anti-business culture in Britain - and we have to stop them. At stake are not pay packages for a few but jobs and prosperity for the many.

A scrupulous writer in every sentence that he writes will ask himself. . . What am I trying to say? What words will express it?...And he probably asks himself. . . Could I put it more shortly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing open your mind and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you

I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are only 'doing their duty'

I thought [first girlfriend] was trying to make a fool out of me. Then I found out that she wasn't, and we went out. That's a very good example of how little confidence I had.

I don't remember a lot of what I write. I try to release it after it's out there so that I can be fresh again.