Real ugly girls have it tough. I feel so sorry for them sometimes.
Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
They must be real people. And this means that every word in every line of speech must be accurate and full of some kind of meaning which stretches not only forward in the book but stems from before in the book.
Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn’t quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you have gone.
A plan is a real thing, and things projected are experienced. A plan once made and visualized becomes reality along with other realities – never to be destroyed but easily to be attacked.
Real revenge is making something of yourself.
The interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.
If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you’re not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.
Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.
A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.
If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they’re real for you whether they’re real or not.
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.
The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.
Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
The man watched him. Real life is pretty bad? What do you think? Well, I think we’re still here. A lot of bad things have happened but we’re still here. Yeah. You don’t think that’s so great. It’s okay.
Maybe. Anyway, some men get what they want. No man. Or perhaps only briefly so as to lose it. Or perhaps only to prove to the dreamer that the world of his longing made real is no longer that world at all.
Not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground.
Real life is only ever just real life. Messy. What it means depends on how you look at it. The only thing you’ve got to do is find a way to live there.
Know yourself and go in swinging, if it hurts when you hit, it might be real, too.