#fiction

Because you live to love and love to live/ And because of what your heardrum will give/ Now we might love to live and live to love. ↗

— Janet Goodfriend

#best #book-club #cape-cod #character #community

The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day--a way of relating. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#writing #art

All writers struggle at some point with the problem of balance between authority and involvement, seduction and revelation. Specifically, beginning writers wonder how much description to employ, and more advanced writers ask how much plot is too much or too little. And there is no better place to find answers than in the Victoria's Secret catalogue--or in any ad for lingerie--where the arts of seduction and revelation are so successfully practiced. After all, the secret of the effective lingerie ad is the secret of effective storytelling--to provide, moment by moment, the illusion of imminent expose, to give the viewer (read: reader) the uncanny sense that something fundamentally compelling is always just about to be revealed. Lingerie ads and storytelling balance the veiled and the unveiled, the seen and the unseen, the shown and the about-to-be-shown. In short, it is the art of the tease, the craft of selective 'coverage,' that, not just in lingerie but in storytelling, works to enthrall. ↗

— Julie Checkoway

#fiction-writing #novel-writing #on-fiction #art

I never look at a painting and ask, "Is this painting fictional or non-fictional?" It's just a painting. ↗

— Scott McClanahan

#fiction #fictional #nonfiction #paintings #art

When I'm writing, really writing, everything but breathing is an ignorable distraction. ↗

— Dennis R. Miller

#how-to-write #on-writing #on-writing-fiction #art

It's time, Perry". He let her go. She took a step back, taking in his face one last time. His green eyes. The bend in his nose and the scars on his cheek. All the tiny inperfections that made him beautiful. Without a word, she turned and made her way downhill. ↗

— Veronica Rossi

#letting-go #romance #under-the-never-sky #young-adult #beauty

I think how the world is still somehow beautiful even when I feel no joy at being alive within it. ↗

— Loung Ung

#sad #beauty

Beautiful people don't need coats. They've got their auras to keep them warm. ↗

— Jennifer Donnelly

#jennifer-donnelly #revolution #urban #beauty

Why would I go look at other women when the most beautiful woman in the world shares my bed every night?” he protested, kissing her lightly. - Gabriel Emerson ↗

— Sylvain Reynard

#romance #beauty

Sometimes I still feel that there are two of me: one clean, flawless picture, the other imperfect and cracked; one boy, one girl; one voice that speaks aloud and one that whispers in my ear; one publicly known to have been troubled but be on the mend, the other who has privately lost something to do with innocence and gained something to do with knowledge and adulthood that can never be undone. I feel sometimes there are things that tear me in two directions, that there are two sets of thoughts that grow side by side. But then I realize that I am whole, whatever that means and does not mean; I am complete without the need for additions or alteration. ↗

— Abigail Tarttelin

#beautiful #commercial #fiction #identity #intersex