A Quote by May Sarton

My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.

May Sarton

Quote Author

May Sarton
American - Novelist
May 3, 1912 - July 16, 1995

The reader has information about the characters that the characters themselves don't have. We all have our secret sides. Even I come to understand things about the characters only through the writing process, as I am going along.

Jaume Cabre

Be very sure of this,-people never reject the Bible because they cannot understand it. They understand it only too well; they understand that it condemns their own behavior; they understand that it witnesses against their own sins, and summons them to judgment.

J. C. Ryle

The only reason we write - well, the only reason why I write; maybe I shouldn't generalize - is so that I can find out something about myself. Writers have this narcissistic obsession about how we got to be who we are. I have to understand my ancestors - my father, his mother and her mother - to understand who I am. It all leads back to the narcissistic pleasure of discovering yourself.

Sandra Cisneros

It's only when I say that everything is incomprehensible that I come as close as possible to understanding the only thing it is given to us to understand.

Eugene Ionesco

We must help all our young people to understand that ours is still a very poor country, that we cannot change this situation radically in a short time, and that only through the united efforts of our younger generation and all our people, working with their own hands, can China be made strong and prosperous within a period of several decades. The establishment of our socialist system has opened the road leading to the ideal society of the future, but to translate this ideal into reality needs hard work.

Mao Zedong

When I came to North America, it was hard. It was hard to understand, hard to get someone to understand me. I only knew Russian. I studied French in school, but it didn't help. I forgot most of that.

Pavel Datsyuk

Everything is in a script for a reason, and only by being part of a writing team (or writing it yourself), do you really understand the intention of every beat.

Peter Jackson

We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love.

Thich Nhat Hanh

I was a teenager when General Zia took power in the Pakistan; I was in my twenties when I went there during the late 1980s and I saw then not only the novel punishments that he was introducing - because they were novel, and this is again something that's very important to understand, it's only in the last thirty, forty years, since 1979 in fact, that these penalties have been revived anywhere in the world apart from Saudi Arabia.

Sadakat Kadri

At the beginning of the project, I wasn't certain that I could come up with an engaging storyline and cast of characters in this world, so I had a strong bias toward actually writing, and worrying about research later. In other words, I was afraid that I'd devote a year or two of my life to grinding through Kant and Husserl, then discover that there simply was no novel to be written here.

Neal Stephenson

Whenever you're writing something that's reflective, you have to put yourself through some sort of ordeal just to understand the way you're feeling.

Damon Albarn

For me writing is an organic process that starts with engaging the language and then thinking about the structure of the novel as you move along. Especially in revision you start to notice correlations. Things come up, not self-consciously, because you're busy feeling your way through sentences and trying to push the language into new places.

Dana Spiotta

A novel makes it possible to understand not just events, but the people who control the events; not only their choices, but also their motives.

David Frum

It's strange. There's your life. You begin it, feeling that it's something so precious and rare, so beautiful that it's like a sacred treasure. Now it's over, and it doesn't make any difference to anyone, and it isn't that they are indifferent, it's just that they don't know, they don't know what it means, that treasure of mine, and there's something about it that they should understand. I don't understand it myself, but there's something that should be understood by all of us. Only what is it? What?

Ayn Rand

When you finally understand who you are, ages 6 through 60 will understand who you are. Because when they see a person that's come through all that I've come through, still standing, it's amazing.

Mary J. Blige

I can only be the best version of myself and understand that the only way that we as a people can heal is to understand that the next person's journey may not be your own, but it doesn't mean that you have to marginalize them in any way.

Octavia Spencer

A Quote by May Sarton

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