Home > Work > The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling
1 " What a lover of words and their beauty discovers. . .is that there is literally a word for every object, material or immaterial, every relation, and every process that human beings have experienced. Because that is what words are: the crystallization in language of thousands of years of experience across numerous cultures and civilizations, each word being the most tangible flesh in which thought is tabernacled. "
― , The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling
2 " Each individual we meet during the course of our day is at any given moment most likely emerging from a state of depression, is already in a state of depression or just about to enter a state of depression . A sensitive teacher always keeps in mind. "
3 " In every sense then, writing is thinking. "
4 " To be frank, I think the elegant, long sentence is a thing of beauty, a self-contained entity worthy of study all by itself. Consider this sentence by Dylan Thomas from Quite Early One Morning: I was born in a large Welsh town at the beginning of the Great War—an ugly, lovely town (or so it was and is to me), crawling, sprawling by a long and splendid curving shore where truant boys and sandfield boys and old men from nowhere, beachcombed, idled and paddled, watched the dock-bound ships or the ships streaming away into wonder and India, magic and China, countries bright with oranges and loud with lions; threw stones into the sea for the barking outcast dogs; made castles and forts and harbours and race tracks in the sand; and on Saturday afternoons listened to the brass band, watched the Punch and Judy, or hung about on the fringes of the crowd to hear the fierce religious speakers who shouted at the sea, as though it were wicked and wrong to roll in and out like that, white-horsed and full of fishes. "
5 " The intellectual world of my time alienated me intellectually. It was a Babel of false principles and blind cravings, a zoological garden of the mind, and I had no desire to be one of the beasts. —George Santayana "