Top 277 Quotes & Sayings by Janet Fitch

A terrific exercise is to take a paragraph of someone's writing who has a really strong style, and using their structure, substitute your own words for theirs, and see how they achieved their effects.

I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn't write again until I was a senior in college.

Your protagonist is your reader's portal into the story. The more observant he or she can be, the more vivid will be the world you're creating. They don't have to be super-educated, they just have to be mentally active. Keep them looking, thinking, wondering, remembering.

A book's flaws make it less predictable.

A cliche is like a coin that has been handled too much. Once language has been overly handled, it no longer leaves a clear imprint.

Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human.

As an undergraduate, I had not studied literature - I was a history major.

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

For me, I'd rather be the inventive one, and if something doesn't work, I'll go back to the workshop, put it on the bench, and pound on it for awhile.

It's a lot to expect of yourself, to write a novel in a year. Anyway, you don't write a novel, you write a scene, and then another scene.

I send all my short fiction to 'Ontario Review' because Joyce Carol Oates is associate editor there, and I think she's fantastic.

My perfect day would be to go on a picnic up Mt. Wilson with Christopher Isherwood, Greta Garbo, Aldous Huxley, and Bertrand Russell.

My father gave me Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' when I was in junior high; my junior high, angst-filled soul responded to that.

A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.

I was into the music scene, but I was also a bit of a perfectionist and very hard on myself... very dark in that way.

I'd rather see a writer write 15 minutes a day than save it all up for a Saturday. A work gets a coating on it when it's not been worked on for a while, makes it hard to break back in.

Dostoevsky was my literary idol for a long time.

I write every day... I never get ideas unless I'm actually writing. Ideas I get in the shower don't do me any good.

I'm particularly fond of the Mulholland Fountain, at Riverside Drive and Los Feliz Boulevard, when it turns colors at night.

Women writers specifically... are the ultimate outsiders.

Anytime you work with materials that are deep parts of yourself, you feel revulsion at showing things about yourself that you don't want people to know.

L.A. is such a real, active place. My mother was very into the core of the city. She worked in politics, and you have to know your territory. It's an active matrix; we're all parts of it, but people don't often stop to wonder what's going on.

I've been depressed many times in my life. But under it all I'm an optimist.

As a person with terrible handwriting, I love the computer. I've waited all my life for the computer.

The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story.

Memory is the fourth dimension to any landscape.

It's your flaws, not your strengths, that go down in the depths of your books. You're exposed, like dreaming you're naked in a public building.

My mother never met a gadget she didn't like. There were tube pans for baking the angel food cakes my father could have after his first heart attack, and Bundt pans and loaf pans and baking pans and grilling pans.

I kept sending out stories and getting rejected.

I despise places where you have to have an assigned seat. Makes me feel like I'm at the airport.

My father was an engineer - he wasn't literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world's great readers. Every two weeks, he'd take me to our local branch library and pull books off the shelf for me, stacking them up in my arms - 'Have you read this? And this? And this?'

Many women get involved with a man that you pretty much know isn't suitable and you're kind of breaking your rules, but he's attractive in some unknown way. And then he doesn't even realize what a sacrifice you're making by being with him and he dumps you!

You start realizing that good prose is crunchy. There's texture in your mouth as you say it. You realize bad writing, bland writing, has no texture, no taste, no corners in your mouth. I'm a great believer in reading aloud.

I think that Oprah's on a mission to improve the lives of the average American in various ways. And one of them is to bring literature to people who would normally not be quite as demanding in their reading tastes, to show them writing that can be more than just entertainment.

We don't have a unitary society anymore, you know; it's very fragmented. I look up and down my block in Silverlake and there is a different universe in every house.

My mother was an enthusiastic chef but wildly disorganized, and often preferred purchasing yet another jar of mace or chili powder rather than having to hunt down its last incarnation.

Use description of landscape to help you establish the emotional tone of the scene. Keep notes of how other authors establish mood and foreshadow events by describing the world around the character.

I started writing when I was 21. I was going to become an historian. And then I realized there was more to the world than just the past. I didn't want to spend my life in the library.

Amazon is a marvelous conglomeration and delivery system for products of every imaginable function. But the book 'business' is really not the same as the sale of lawn rakes or adapters for telephones.

I have a hard time with abstractions. I always go to the personal.

My mother had been a solitary chef. It was her recreation and her escape.

When you have success, people think you know what you're doing, and you start to agree with them, you think you can conquer the world. But you go from grandiosity to panic.

A figure in Los Angeles politics for five decades, my mother nevertheless had had her fill of talking to people by the time she came home at night.

Most women experience issues of power and sexuality, but very few women talk about it. There's the threat of the loss of approval.

Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an atomic bomb.

My house is modern, but I like my writing room to be old fashioned. I write on a little wooden secretary desk.

As an artist, you can never get what you want. What you do never approaches what you want it to be.

The thing that makes vivid writing is when the reader is in the body of the story, the body of the character. Things smell like something; there's weather, there's texture, there's light.

Crime novelists do really well with Los Angeles.

When you're a little kid, you are small, your life is small - and you're terrifically aware of that. But when you read, you can ride Arabian horses across the desert, you can be a dogsledder.

I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language.

My thoughts about God are vague and abstract. My connection with the energy of the universe is shaky.

My father was an engineer - he wasn't literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world's great readers.

To make films, you have to have boundless energy; you have to work and play with others really, really well, and I'm really a more contemplative kind of person. I like to sit at home and think, a lot.

I write all the time, whether I feel like it or not. I never get inspired unless I'm already writing.

A lot of people think they should be happy all the time. But the writer understands you need both. You need the whole piano: the richness of the whole human experience. Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human.

I've always been concerned with what happens to children in our society when there's nobody left to take care of them.

I write every day, including weekends. For writers, there are no weekends. It's just that your family is around, looking mournful, wondering when you're going to pay attention to them.

I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don't even know what's going on with me until I'm writing. That doesn't mean my books are autobiographical.

As a middle-aged woman who has had some luck as a writer, I'd like this profession of author to remain a possibility for young writers in the future - and not become an arena solely for the hobbyist or the well-heeled.