Words matter. These are the best Janet Fitch Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
As an undergraduate, I had not studied literature – I was a history major.
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.
I’ve been depressed many times in my life. But under it all I’m an optimist.
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.
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’ve always been concerned with what happens to children in our society when there’s nobody left to take care of them.
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.
As an artist, you can never get what you want. What you do never approaches what you want it to be.
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.
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.
I write all the time, whether I feel like it or not. I never get inspired unless I’m already writing.
Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human.
Crime novelists do really well with Los Angeles.
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.
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.
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 have a hard time with abstractions. I always go to the personal.
My father gave me Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ when I was in junior high; my junior high, angst-filled soul responded to that.
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.
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.
While out on the perimeter, women discovered the freedom of badlands. They were curiously free to invent, without having to liberate themselves from the forms and rewards of the cultural norm.
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.
My mother had been a solitary chef. It was her recreation and her escape.
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 just wanted to live in books and in movies.
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!
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.
I despise places where you have to have an assigned seat. Makes me feel like I’m at the airport.
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.
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 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.
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?’
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.