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Famous Sean Norris Quotes

“About the author: Sean Michael Norris believes that this book serves as a sort of autobiography. Despite the fact that this story is a fictional product of his imagination, he feels that it represents a true portrait of his experience — that it honestly depicts how a younger, more vulnerable version of himself saw the world. And if he’s right about that, then to read this book is to learn about its author at a deeper level than any list of biographical facts could ever enable you to reach.”

“That’s the funny thing about stories — like all living things, they need to adapt and evolve in order to survive in their environment. Consider for a second that you can drop the same exact species into ten different ecosystems and within a few dozen generations, they could be hardly recognizable from their original form or to each other. The same is true for stories. They mutate to fit the cognitive conditions of each person’s specific mental habitat. That’s why a group of people can experience the same exact event, and within a decade or two, the story of that event can be wildly different as told by each person who experienced it.”

“Hemingway once said that ‘there is nothing to writing, you just sit down at a typewriter and bleed.’ What Hemingway failed to mention is that bleeding is the easy part. To cut is what makes writing hard. Sitting down to write and hitting that first key or touching the tip of your pen to that blank sheet of paper - that’s the hard part. Once you start - once you spill that first bit of ink and let it bleed into the page, the rest takes care of itself. There’s nothing to it. You just sit there and bleed until it stops. It is not for this reason, but it’s still interesting and worth mentioning that the word ‘write’ comes from the Proto-Germanic word ‘writan,’ which literally meant to scratch, tear, or cut.”