Janet Fitch Quotes
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I write all the time, whether I feel like it or not. I never get inspired unless I'm already writing.
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I just wanted to live in books and in movies.
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Your protagonist is your reader's portal into the story. The more observant he or she can be, the more vivid will be the world you're creating. They don't have to be super-educated, they just have to be mentally active. Keep them looking, thinking, wondering, remembering.
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I was into the music scene, but I was also a bit of a perfectionist and very hard on myself... very dark in that way.
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As a person with terrible handwriting, I love the computer. I've waited all my life for the computer.
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While out on the perimeter, women discovered the freedom of badlands. They were curiously free to invent, without having to liberate themselves from the forms and rewards of the cultural norm.
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The thing that makes vivid writing is when the reader is in the body of the story, the body of the character. Things smell like something; there's weather, there's texture, there's light.
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A lot of people think they should be happy all the time. But the writer understands you need both. You need the whole piano: the richness of the whole human experience. Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human.
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Crime novelists do really well with Los Angeles.
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When working on your own, you can make a choice and find out six months later that you made a bad choice. But when you work with people you trust, who understand your obsessions, you can take risks.
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I send all my short fiction to 'Ontario Review' because Joyce Carol Oates is associate editor there, and I think she's fantastic.
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Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an atomic bomb.
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A book's flaws make it less predictable.
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I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.
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Nineteen is as alive as 40-plus. I can vividly remember 19 and how I saw the world.
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My house is modern, but I like my writing room to be old fashioned. I write on a little wooden secretary desk.
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My perfect day would be to go on a picnic up Mt. Wilson with Christopher Isherwood, Greta Garbo, Aldous Huxley, and Bertrand Russell.