#tory

I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph. ↗

— George Saunders

#i #lot #novel #now #paragraph

I've had the thought that a person's 'artistic vision' is really just the cumulative combination of whatever particular stances he has sincerely occupied during his creative life - even if some of those might appear contradictory. ↗

— George Saunders

#artistic #combination #contradictory #creative #creative life

So for me the approach has become to go into a story not really sure of what I want to say, try to find some little seed crystal of interest, a sentence or an image or an idea, and as much as possible divest myself of any deep ideas about it. And then by this process of revision, mysteriously it starts to accrete meanings as you go. ↗

— George Saunders

#any #approach #become #crystal #deep

That seems to be the definition of 'novel' for me: a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief. ↗

— George Saunders

#definition #discovered #hasn #me #novel

The business, task or object of the scientific study of languages will if possible be 1) to trace the history of all known languages. Naturally this is possible only to a very limited extent and for very few languages. ↗

— Ferdinand de Saussure

#extent #few #history #known #languages

When the people contend for their liberty, they seldom get anything by their victory but new masters. ↗

— George Savile

#contend #get #liberty #masters #new

I love the early process of asking questions about a story and deciding which questions matter most. ↗

— Diane Sawyer

#asking #asking questions #deciding #early #i

There certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#certainly #come #detective #detective story #does

I certainly grew up seeing more movies and television than I read books, but when it came time to do the thing itself you don't have to hire a lot of people to sit down and write a book, so that was the story-telling medium that was available to me. ↗

— John Sayles

#book #books #came #certainly #down

I figured somebody wrote a story who had a typewriter and I thought that movies were made by the cowboys and that they just said, 'Okay, you fall off the horse this time.' ↗

— John Sayles

#fall #figured #had #horse #i