The human desire to know why is as powerful as the desire to know what happened next, and it is a desire of a higher order.

- Janet Burroway

Part of the trouble is that I've never properly understood that some disasters accumulate, that they don't all land like a child out of an apple tree.

- Janet Burroway

If character is the foreground of fiction, setting is the background, and as in a painting's composition, the foreground may be in harmony or in conf…

- Janet Burroway

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of rearing and peering from the bent ti…

- Janet Burroway

What is the pattern of change?

- Janet Burroway

Reject without regret whatever seems on reflection wrongheaded, dull, destructive, or irrelevant to your vision. It’s just as important to be able to…

- Janet Burroway

I sit and pass judgment on myself: this is dull, this is unclear, this is insignificant: ergo I am dull, I am unclear, I am insignificant.

- Janet Burroway

The mystique and the false glamour of the writing profession grow partly out of a mistaken belief that people who can express profound ideas and emot…

- Janet Burroway

What matters is not publication or success (success is bad for your prose) but the practice of the imaginative act. Our damaged values depend on it.

- Janet Burroway