I want the reader to feel something is astonishing – not the ‚what happens‘ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

Tears of joy are like the summer rain drops pierced by sunbeams.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

May we so love as never to have occasion to repent of our love!

Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.

On one occasion, I accompanied my father to Pinares de Mayari. I was eight or nine years old. How he enjoyed talking when he left the house in Biran! There he was the proprietor of the land where sugar cane, pasture, and other agricultural crops were planted.

I feel like I just grabbed a big juicy worm with a right sharp hook in the middle of it.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I’m 100 percent fiction writer… I don’t want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don’t state my political messages to anybody.

And if you’re horrible to me I’m going to write a song about you and you are not going to like it. That’s how I operate.

Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

The uncertainty of parenting can bring up feelings in us that range from frustration to terror.

The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.

Intense feeling too often obscures the truth.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.

I’m not ashamed to say I fear something.

I can’t consciously explain how people feel after reading my books. All is too personal.

It is best to love wisely, no doubt; but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all.

Everyone has been in love, at some point or another.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.

Nature, like man, sometimes weeps from gladness.

In the normal flow of a conversation, our attention is divided. We hear parts of what other people are saying, in order to follow and keep the conversation going. At the same time, we’re planning what we’ll say next, some exciting story of our own.

I’m half-black, half-white, so I basically put it like this: I can fit in anywhere. That’s why I write so many stories from so many different perspectives, because I’ve seen so many.

Jealousy… is a mental cancer.

Your feelings so are important to write down, to capture, and to remember because today you’re heartbroken, but tomorrow you’ll be in love again.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots.

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

The degree of one’s emotions varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts.

One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.

Generally speaking, if a human being never shows anger, then I think something’s wrong. He’s not right in the brain.

Sometimes you can’t prioritise family and you feel guilty.

I don’t hate women – they just sometimes make me mad.

When you look at me, when you think of me, I am in paradise.

You do get certain publications in the States where, if things don’t go according to plan, they flip the story and it becomes very negative.

There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls, but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. Of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts.

It is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn’t have an eventful childhood.

Almost everybody will listen to you when you tell your own story.

People like to hear the word ‚love.‘

Every story has its demands.

Ain’t nothing like a good cry.

I don’t think there’s an option for me to fall in love slowly or at medium speed. I either do, or I don’t.

Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren’t susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place.

I don’t think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.

It is necessary to fall in love… if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.

Hatred is inveterate anger.

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer. You’re gay, you’re sick, you’re nervous or whatever.

With action films, it’s great if it’s not just driven by action, but by a good story and interesting characters, as well. Though, there’s nothin‘ like kicking butt!

If your heart is a volcano, how shall you expect flowers to bloom?

‚Discworld‘ is taking something that you know is ridiculous and treating it as if it is serious, to see if something interesting happens when you do so.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

We do not hate as long as we still attach a lesser value, but only when we attach an equal or a greater value.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

I got interested in reading very early, because a story was read to me, by Hans Christian Andersen, which was ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ and I don’t know if you remember ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ but it’s dreadfully sad. The little mermaid falls in love with this prince, but she cannot marry him because she is a mermaid.

When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.

Be amusing: never tell unkind stories; above all, never tell long ones.

I would love to sign on to do a movie if it was the right role and if it was the right script, because I would be taking time away from music to tell a big grand story, and spend all of my time and pouring all of my emotions into being someone else. So for me to do that, it would have to be a story worth telling.

If my life was a movie, no one would believe it.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.