Seth > Seth's Quotes

“A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, "Simba!”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“he appeared not at all auctorial in the insufferable sense of the word (I think of writers who pose with their dogs, or hold questionable medical devices, or mousse their hair until its specific gravity resembles that of pound cake).”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer

“Even arcing fictions can be designed, with texture, color, symmetry, or repetitions graphable as wavelike stripes”
― Jane Alison, Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time