As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the imaginative process of creating believable characters in fiction.
Julia Glass expresses the unique role of a fiction writer, emphasizing the intricate task of breathing life into invented characters. The writer's craft lies in making the fictional tangible and relatable, blurring the lines between reality and imagination.
In practice
In a workshop on creative writing, this quote can inspire students to explore character development.
I write because I'm in love with language; because I like working for myself, inside my head; and because it's the only way I know to make a stab at answering the never-ending questions of the heart that arise simply from the everyday living of our lives.
...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.
Real fashion change comes from real changes in real life. Everything else is just decoration.
If you don't know what to play, play nothing.
Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.
I love to see lack of clarity in a performance as well as clarity, as well as trust, as well as the kinds of things that human beings go through. I love to see spontaneity and 'inevitability.' How it gets there is going to shock the hell out of me, but it will get there somehow.
One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.
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