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Were it not for the relationship I have with Christ, the world surely would have run me down by now....Certainly I'll never find the level of compassion Christ carried, but trying to learn that compassion is enough to carry me through.
Bret Lott -
Literary fiction is fiction that examines the character of the people involved in the story, and that popular fiction is driven by plot. Whereas popular fiction, I tell them, is meant primarily as a means of escape, one way or another, from this present life, a kind of book equivalent of comfort food, literary fiction confronts us with who we are and makes us look deeply at the human condition.
Bret Lott
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It would be inaccurate, however, to say that my childhood was untroubled. The normal fears and worries of every child were in me developed to a high degree; every day was an awesome prospect. I was uneasy about practically everything: the uncertainty of the future, the dark of the attic, the panoply and discipline of school, the transitoriness of life, the mystery of the church and of God, the frailty of the body, the sadness of afternoon, the shadow of sex, the distant challenge of love and marriage, the far-off problem of a livelihood.
Bret Lott -
Learning to write . . . is a desperately idiosyncratic, eccentric, single-souled, lifelong quest.
Bret Lott -
Bicycling beyond the Divide did what all great books do: it told me about me. In its tale of a journey made by two different men-both of them Daryl Farmer-this book offers us not only moving vistas and meaningful people, but also hope, that rarest of literary commodities these days. I didn't want this to end.
Bret Lott -
I felt on my back gentle pats like fragile wings just touching me, touching me: my grandchildren's hands.
Bret Lott -
Don't leave you to go find your point of view and your story. You are all you have been given . . . this is who you are, and from where you ought and need to write.
Bret Lott