Julia Barnes-brown

“I try to write something new. It’s bad and I stop after a few sentences. Even though I didn’t feel it at the time, I got into a rhythm with the old novel. I knew those characters and how to write them. I heard their voices and I saw their gestures and anything else feels fake and stiff. I ache for them, people I also once felt were stiff and fake, but who now seem like the only people I could ever write about.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“I don’t write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don’t, everything feels even worse.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“Calla is a woman in the same way that the sky is blue. She understands that it’s the easiest identifier to slap on and she doesn’t mind it, but in actuality, the sky is an incomprehensible void, and Calla, too, feels closer to a nebulous, inexact entity. Before she is anything else, Calla is just Calla.”
― Chloe Gong, Immortal Longings

“I tell them the truth. I tell them I am thirty-one years old and seventy-three thousand dollars in debt. I tell them that since college I’ve moved eleven times, had seventeen jobs and several relationships that didn’t work out. I’ve been estranged from my father since twelfth grade, and earlier this year my mother died. My only sibling lives three thousand miles away. What I have had for the past six years, what has been constant and steady in my life is the novel I’ve been writing. This has been my home, the place I could always retreat to. The place I could sometimes even feel powerful, I tell them. The place where I am most myself. Maybe some of you, I tell them, have found this place already. Maybe some of you will find it years from now. My hope is that some of you will find it for the first time today by writing.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers