Explore Quotes by Janet Fitch

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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?'

Nineteen is as alive as 40-plus. I can vividly remember 19 and how I saw the world.

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

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.

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

Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.