182 Quotes About Fiction-writing

Elvis wasn’t always the over-weight and over-tasseled being you might have seen when he was way past his prime. Las Vegas always had a thing for the seedy and the needy.

On the Greek island of Hydra there are no cars. You have to travel by donkey or walk. If you go up the hill from the harbor and walk the ancient paved pathways you will enter a square of sorts and find a tavern called Douskos. If you sit there under the tree, pick up a battered guitar and sing sweetly to the cat, they will kick you out. They’ve had enough of that sort of thing already at Douskos. Stop there if you can. I did. I had to. Leonard and Joni wanted some private time.

By all the rules of modern fiction there should have been gunsmoke mingling its acrid blue with the brown haze of corral dust. Dead men should have fallen and been trampled...Nothing of this sort happened.

I still maintain that the times get precisely the literature that they deserve, and that if the writing of this period is gloomy the gloom is not so much inherent in the literature as in the times.

…Shakespeare is both my door knocker and the owner of the domains to which the knock admits me, at once my Virgil opening the gates of hell and heaven, and the devil, and God, and I say this as a person who believes in neither God nor the devil, I believe only in Virgil…

A long walk. A very long walk. Sand between my toes. The rough surf at times reaching and washing away my footprints. About a mile down the beach, I sat down and started thinking back through everything Vance had told me so far. Thought about what my next moves would be. Seeing the Asian guy tomorrow and having him snoop would settle one thing in my mind. Did Vance do it or not? Crucial. Until I knew that, I didn’t want to go any further.

Yep. God’s giving me a second chance at motherhood as a“thank you” for killing a bunch of scumbags. He’s looking down andthinking, “Well done, Susie. You’ll make a fine mommy.

There’s no skin in heaven.

They went to loft downtown. V. cool, artsy, mostly artists, kind of boho wild. There was even a naked guy walking around. I asked why. She didn't know but probably he just needed attention disguised as being artsy.