Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.
Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life.
I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitments, awaited those who had the courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils.
I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.
The obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and it is manna. The real work of deep grief is making a home there.
And the more she could imagine this island, the less she liked the real world. The more she could imagine the people, the less she liked any real people.
You can spend your whole life building a wall of facts between you and anything real.
Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.
Real writers write because they love to write. They don’t write for public acclaim.
The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it’s only intangibles, ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.
I want to find something else, unknowable, some place that’s not on the map. A real adventure.
I hate how I don’t feel real enough unless people are watching.
No, none of us seem so very real. We’re only supporting characters in the lives of each other. Any real truth, any precious fact will always be lost in a mountain of shattered make-believe.
The world will always punish the few people with special talents the rest of us don’t recognize as real.
You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.
If your body is a temple, you can pile up too much deferred maintenance. If your body is a temple, mine was a real fixer-upper.
There was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it with.
You’ll need to suffer to make any real art.
For six months I couldn’t sleep. With insomnia, nothing’s real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.
You realize that people take drugs because it’s the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. It’s only in drugs or death we’ll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.