A PORTRAIT A DAY KEEPS MYSELF SANE

“I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood. My characters—I would like to have them heavier, more three-dimensional … My characters have a profession, have characteristics; you know their age, their family situation, and everything. But I try to make each one of those characters heavy, like a statue, and to be the brother of everybody in the world.”
― Georges Simenon

I am writing a book about the Crusades so dull that I can scarcely write it.

Hillaire Belloc

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.
George Santayana

Searching for what I need, and I don’t even know precisely what that is, I was going from a man to a man, and I saw that all of them together have less than me who has nothing, and that I left to each of them a bit of that what I don’t have and I’ve been searching for.
Ivo Andric

No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.

Eudora Welty