The promise of eternal life makes people forsake the life they’re given.
And loss of control is always the source of fear. It is also, however, always the source of change.
There are never words for the strongest of our feelings. There is just the pain that we cannot share. Pain we must all feel alone.
We did what our people do all the time, we told ourselves something we did was right and we found a way to justify it, even though we knew it was wrong.
The past doesn’t matter. People cling to it because it allows them to ignore the present.
I hadn’t learned yet that everybody’s locked up some way or other. That’s how life is we’re all imprisoned by something.
When something is staring you in the face in your life and you see it with your own two eyes and feel it within your heart only a fool doesn’t believe it to be true.
Faith is the fool’s excuse.
A miracle is changing someone’s life. Freeing them from whatever bonds them. Giving them the gift of being able to live the way they dream of living.
The feeling of arms around me, of love in my heart, it was more powerful than any of the negativity I knew was existing in the world for me. That feeling of love killed it all.
I say to myself if you believe deeply in your heart you must defy, and if you are willing to pay for your defiance, you must always do it, even though the pain may be much. Too many times in our lives we do not do it, and we pay even more...
Writer’s block is real. It happens. Some days you sit down at the old typewriter, put your fingers on the keys, and nothing pops into your head. Blanko. Nada. El nothingissimo. What you do when this happens is what separates you from the one-of-thesedays- I’m-gonna-write-a-book crowd.
Novel writing is like heroin addiction; it takes everything you’ve got.
To set a forest on fire, you light a match. To set a character on fire, you put him in conflict.
All good plots come from well-orchestrated characters pitted against one another in a conflict of wills.
It is possible to combine a story line and plot line in the same work. Usually the storylines comes first, serving as a background to the plot line, but not always.
The opposing missions of the various characters create the plot.
You will never work through writer’s block if you walk away from your typewriter. That will only make it easier to walk away the next time.
It has been said that Ernest Hemingway would rewrite scenes until they pleased him, often thirty or forty times. Hemingway, critics claimed, was a genius. Was it his genius that drove him to work hard, or was it hard work that resulted in works of genius?
For some it is harder to write a novel than to row a bathtub across the North Atlantic.