Reject without regret whatever seems on reflection wrongheaded, dull, destructive, or irrelevant to your vision. It’s just as important to be able to discriminate between helpful and unhelpful criticism as it is to be able to write. — Janet Burroway Copy Share Image
The mystique and the false glamour of the writing profession grow partly out of a mistaken belief that people who can express profound ideas… — Janet Burroway Copy Share Image
The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of rearing and peering… — Janet Burroway Copy Share Image
Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page. — Janet Burroway Copy Share Image
In literature only trouble is interesting. It takes trouble to turn the great themes of life into a story: birth, love, sex, work, and… — Janet Burroway Copy Share Image
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… — Janet Burroway Copy Share Image
I sit and pass judgment on myself: this is dull, this is unclear, this is insignificant: ergo I am dull, I am unclear, I… — Janet Burroway Copy Share Image
The only justification for writing a novel is that it should be wonderful. Adequate is inadequate. — Janet Burroway Copy Share Image
Good girls like myself need subversion. Being solemn, I aspire to comedy. Being a novelist, I aspire to the musical. Being organized, I aspire… — Janet Burroway Copy Share Image
What matters is not publication or success (success is bad for your prose) but the practice of the imaginative act. Our damaged values depend… — Janet Burroway Copy Share Image
The human desire to know why is as powerful as the desire to know what happened next, and it is a desire of a… — Janet Burroway Copy Share Image
