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Quote by Diane Johnson

“In what we think of as bad dialogue, the characters talk directly to each other.”

Author

Diane Johnson is an American novelist born on April 28, 1934. Her works are known for their wit, humor, and profound psychological insights, primarily exploring the lives, loves, and career choices of modern women. more

“I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.”

Ifs Thinking Feels Writing May Quality Novel Virtue Connected Crafts Limitation Conventional

Book:The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Writers are lampposts and critics are dogs. Ask lampposts what they think about dogs. Does the dog hurt the lamppost?”

Thinking Doe Asks Hurt Honest Dog Critics

Author:Paulo Coelho

“We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself.”

Form Technique Crafts Indifferent Efficiency

Author:Czeslaw Milosz

“Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?”

Ifs Character Stories Would Be Fiction Happened Depends Circumstances Prove Crafts Plot Somewhere Else Crossroads

Author:Eudora Welty

“I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. ... Of course, it rarely ends that way.”

Way Ends Stories Courses Knowing Crafts Chapters

Author:Kazuo Ishiguro

“What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is for the conveying of a great thought! ... Prose wanders around with a lantern & laboriously schedules & verifies the details & particulars of a valley & its frame of crags & peaks, then Poetry comes, & lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash.”

Whole Poor Lays Details Crafts Wander Landscape Prose Valleys Vehicle Flash Schedules Splendid Lanterns Verify Conveying

Author:Mark Twain

“The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.”

Real Beautiful Work Attention Produce Poet Crafts Fixing Something Real

Book:Gravity and Grace

Source: Gravity and Grace

“Load every rift with ore.”

Crafts Load Rift

Author:John Keats

“Fill the moment and find variety.”

Moments Crafts Variety

Author:Paul Newman

“No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clichés that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn nor commonplace to him. ... The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart's blood.”

Quote by Diane Johnson

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