"Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others). If we learn what a truthful sentence looks like, a little flag goes up at a false one."

George Saunders, Thank You, Esther Forbes

"

A person can write: “There were, out in the bay, a number of rocks, islands of a sort, and upon these miniature islands, there resided a number of gulls, which, as the sun began to rise, gradually came to life, ready to begin another day of searching for food.”

Or she can write: “On rocky islands gulls woke.”

"

George Saunders, Thank You, Esther Forbes

"They were not merely sentences but compressed moments that burst when you read them."

George Saunders, Thank You, Esther Forbes

"Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven."

Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings

(Source: mythologyofblue)

"A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act."

George Orwell, 1984

How To Create A Plot Outline In 8 Easy Steps

Click to read. Very helpful article.

"There will be time for that when I have decided whether she has a pen in her hand or a pickaxe."

Virginia Woof, A Room of One’s Own

"Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes."

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

"If one shuts one’s eyes and thinks of the novel as a whole, it would seem to be a creation owning a certain looking-glass likeness to life, though of course with simplifications and distortions innumerable. At any rate, it is a structure leaving a shape on the mind’s eye, built now in squares, now pagoda shaped, now throwing out wings and arcades, now solidly compact and domed like the Cathedral of Saint Sofia at Constantinople. This shape, I thought, thinking back over certain famous novels, starts in one the kind of emotion that is appropriate to it. But that emotion at once blends itself with others, for the ‘shape’ is not made by the relation of stone to stone, but by the relation of human being to human being. Thus a novel starts in us all sorts of antagonistic and opposed emotions."

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

"What is meant by ‘reality’? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates. Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more thn other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us."

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own