Janette Turner Hospital
We inherit plots. There are only two or three in the world, five or six at most. We ride them like treadmills.
There are all kinds of under-represented groups in the literary establishment.
All of my writing career is about how human beings negotiate dark matter.
I am extremely interested in how people negotiate catastrophe, not because I'm morbidly interested in it but because I'm interested in the secret of resilience; that's what I'm always exploring in the stories and the novels.
The act of writing surprises me all the time. A miraculous thing happens when you have an idea and you want to convert it into words... and then you start to create a work of art, and that's another miracle, and it remains mysterious to the writer, or to this writer anyway.
The futility of action does not absolve one from the failure to act. -Collection: Doe
The world is crammed with messages. We’ll never have time to read them all.Collection: World
I've found you can go on writing in the dark, and that the act of writing itself, that mysterious, dangerous, intoxicating, absorbing, nourishing magician's trick, that act of creation is its own light.Collection: Writing
Her days come and go like birds, her dreams like days.Collection: Dream
It often seems to me that the biggest single issue for a writer is how to stay buoyant enough to go on writing. How not to drown.Collection: Writing
There is always a gap between conception and execution. We keep writing in the burning hope of closing that gap before we die.Collection: Writing
That is where homeland is. In that shifting space, kinfolk know one another by secret signs; and wherever kinfolk meet, homeland soil coalesces about their feet in the mysterious way that coral cays, like seabirds pausing in flight, anchor themselves to the Barrier Reef.Collection: Anchors
Herschel Grynszpan's life was enigmatic, elusive and tragic. The traces he left on the historical record are just sufficient to tantalize and baffle historians. Harlan Greene has woven from these threads a riveting novel, erotic, haunting, and profoundly moving.Collection: Moving