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1 " Freedom is your soul in the emptiness of night. Freedom is this dark that is as great as what it holds the stars and everything beneath it and yet how it seems to be nothing, has no beginning, no end, and no center. "
― Paul Lynch , Grace
2 " Daylight tricks you into thinking what you see is truth, lets you go through life thinking you know everything. But the truth is we are sleepwalkers. We walk through the night that is chaos and dark and forever keeps its truth to itself. "
3 " Meditation forms a part of my daily life and it guides my mind into the necessary space for writing. It seems that I enter some kind of alertful trance when I work. I become the moment in which I am writing. And yet I am there, the author, standing in the river and meddling with the flow. "
― Paul Lynch
4 " I wanted to explore how we live our lives in certainty, only to discover that we really know nothing, that the truth is we are philosophically blind. And yet the human mind cannot help but tell itself narratives to explain the world. "
5 " Writing is following the sky of your mind. Who knows from where the winds blow. Or perhaps we are diviners. You cannot see the spring beneath but suddenly there is a twitch in the stick. "
6 " Writing is rewriting and though there are many passages in my books that are essentially a first take, everything else can take many, many attempts before it finds the ideal shape. And what makes it ideal? I know it when I read it. "
7 " I do think you must always write for the ideal reader. But it would be folly to worry too much about who exactly that is. "
8 " This place called heaven, this realm of perfection and life everlasting. When it comes down to it, nobody ever wants to go there. Now isn’t that strange? I’ll tell you what I’ve seen. I’ve seen faith fall apart at the moment of death. I’ve seen people fight it in every way how. I’ve seen the terror in their eyes. The scratching, the squirming. If god is life ever after then why is it nobody ever wants to go to him and meet him? "
― Paul Lynch , Red Sky in Morning
9 " I spend a lot of time on my own thinking betwixt me and the saddle and I ain’t come up with much but I did come up with this—the difference between man and beast is we’re able to imagine the future and they’re not. But what makes us no better than em is we cain’t predict it. "
10 " The sea in the distance opening a doorway. Familiar faces turning in half-light and sounds of speech and the way that each body moves uniquely in memory, each memory rising in its own kinked light that is seen briefly but not held, each memory breaking like surf one wave over the other leaving a wash of emptiness. "
11 " I ask myself if I have got close enough to what I am writing about. Often, I find the closer you get, the more texture you are going to end up with. That for sure will slow a reader down. And great if it does. "
12 " Literature is about contemplation not speed-reading for plot or fact. I try to give the reader what I call the startling moment—to take them down to the heartbeat of a character. To open the moment out in all its richness. "
13 " I certainly do not fear for the life of literature. There will always be people born wired for books. Every age has its contemplatives. "
14 " The internet generates a constant fear of missing out. It is the tyranny of the new. But what the writer seeks is human truth and that is as old as the ages. "
15 " A book often begins with a vision, something half-seen that needs to be explored. "
16 " What hides in plain sight is the inexplicable. It is an absence that is always present. "
17 " How do you write about what can’t be written about? I try to bend language until it can suggest the ineffable, the great gap between what we think we know, and what we don’t know. The felt but not expressed. The intuited but not understood. "
18 " What I’m interested in discovering is human truth. What does it mean to be alive within the dream of life? It seems to me there are essential human truths that have never changed throughout the ages, and that what we think of as unique to our own time is, in fact, the general. I am convinced, as a writer, that we must be able to witness ourselves as we have been moved and shaped by such universal forces. "
19 " I believe it is worth writing to remind ourselves of what we can’t know. To remind ourselves that certainty is dangerous. That factual knowledge of the world casts only a small light. Fiction is necessary because it seems to me that only fiction can accommodate the total strangeness that is life. To remind us that truth is actually impossible. "
