Paul Harding Quotes

Don't write your books for people who won't like them. Give yourself wholly to the kind of book you want to write, and don't try to please readers who like something different.

Paul Harding

• Write
• Books
• Readers

I worry that if whatever pops into your head at any instant immediately goes online, you lose the crucial time for your thoughts to simmer and evolve and build up nuance, depth and empathy.

Paul Harding

• Time
• Head
• Empathy

If you want to be a writer, you write. Everybody wants to get published. You gotta play your long game.

Paul Harding

• Game
• Writer
• Published

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

Paul Harding

• Truth
• Fiction
• Liar

Write as precisely and as lucidly and as richly as you can about what you find truly mysterious and irreducible about human experience, and not obscurely about what will prove to be received opinion or cliche once the reader figures out your stylistic conceit. There's all the difference in the world between mystery and mystification.

Paul Harding

• Difference
• Mystification

The only thing common to all of this is that I feel sorrow so deep, it must be love...

Paul Harding

• Love
• Deep
• Sorrow

Don't confine truth to fact. Imaginative truth is as powerful, and often enough, more so than fact.

Paul Harding

• Truth
• Fact