An online literary journal dedicated to minority writers

           Notable Quotables

             Every now and again, I’ll run across a little gem uttered by a writer, actor or other showbiz type, philosopher, musician, etc., that seems really profound when you consider it in terms of writing. I’ll let you be the judge. 

“Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.”

“The most essential gift for any writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have it.”

“What a writer wants to do is not what he does.”

“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination—what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not.”

— Jorge Luis Borge

— Ernest Hemingway

— Garrison Keillor

— John Keats, British poet (1795-1821)

“The novelist is inviting the reader to watch a performance in his own brain.”

— George Buchanan

“The reason one writes isn’t the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

“If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.”

— Lillian Hellman

“Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.”

— Franz Kafka

“It’s not whether you really cry. It’s whether the audience thinks you are crying.”

— Ingrid Bergman,  Actress

“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.”

— Neils Bohr, Physicist

— Lord Byron

“But words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.”

“Write from the soul, not from some notion what you think the marketplace wants. The market is fickle; the soul is eternal.”

— Jeffrey Carver

“Keep in mind that the person to write for is yourself. Tell the story you most desperately want to read.”

— Susan Isaacs