74 Quotes by Jessamyn West

Roth wrote The Breast. Would you ask him how he could do this since he had never been a breast? Adams wrote Watership Down. Would you ask him how he could do this since he admitted his rabbit knowledge came from a book about rabbits? ... And those hobbits!... I am a bigger risk-taker than these others. The Hoosiers can contradict me. No rabbit, hobbit, or breast has been known to speak up in reply to their exploiters.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely essential.

When she had found [another]. . .taking over the task of helping the bride she had felt a great pang, first of jealousy and anger, and finally sorrow. And the sorrow was the heavier because she knew she had brought it on herself. It came to her then that the only real pleasures in life resulted from a feeling of success in relationships with others: in being daughter, wife, mother. And she knew she had not succeeded very well in any of these lines.

I am always jumping into the sausage grinder and deciding, even before I’m half ground, that I don’t want to be a sausage after all.

Knowledge of what you love somehow comes to you; you don’t have to read nor analyze nor study. If you love a thing enough, knowledge of it seeps into you, with particulars more real than any chart can furnish.

They darted like needles through the morning - they wove the bright May morning into a fabric strong enough to support a party.

But Lon was not only entertainment; he mixed entertainment with information like a modern novelist who not only gives you a lot of love-making, but also leaves you, when the lovers part, with a lot of information about running a hotel, avoiding sharks, or living in a kibbutz.

You can only write about what you don't know, and find out about it in the writing.