Writing Quote by Flannery O'Connor

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

— Flannery O'Connor

“Of all the principles I'd learn about story, the idea that a character is what he does remains the hardest to actually live.”

— Donald Miller

“T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the…

— Mark Twain

“For the dead can live only with the exact intensity and quality of the life imparted to them by the living.”

— Joseph Conrad

“contrary to some opinions, it is better to be a dead hero than a live louse. Dying is messy and inconvenient but even a…

— Robert A. Heinlein

“Andrew Davies has said he prefers his authors dead, and I can see there is only a limited usefulness in a live one when…

— Alan Hollinghurst

If you're playing someone who has lived, there's the risk of imitation, or whether you focus on the essence of who that character was…

— Hayley Atwell

“Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate...but with…

— Franz Kafka

Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and…

— John Banville

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem…

— James A. Baldwin

The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.

— Simone de Beauvoir

“In many ways. . .the completeness of biography, the achievement of its professionalization, is an ironic fiction, since no life can ever be known…

— Ira Bruce Nadel