Cfay

“Characters in novels sometimes radiate more energy, therefore, when we don’t enter their mind. It is one of the techniques a novelist acquires instinctively—don’t go into your protagonist’s thoughts until you have something to say about his or her inner life that is more interesting than the reader’s suppositions.”
― Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing

“All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“They have read your novel,’ Woland said, ‘and they said only one thing, that, unfortunately, it is not finished. So I wanted to show you your hero. He has been sitting here for about two thousand years, sleeping, but, when the moon is full, he is tormented, as you see, by insomnia. And it torments not only him, but his faithful guardian, the dog.

If it is true that cowardice is the most grave vice, then the dog, at least, is not guilty of it. The only thing that brave creature ever feared was thunderstorms. But what can be done, the one who loves must share the fate of the one who is loved.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Kingsley used to tell the following anecdote about sibling rivalry – how he found me, when I was four or five, lying on the stairs in an ecstasy of grief, how he worriedly knelt at my side and, after several minutes, managed to quell my hiccuppy gaspings, my heaving chest. Then he said, ‘Easy now . . . What is it?’ When at last I could find and shape the words, I said, ‘Philip had a biscuit’ . . .”
― Martin Amis, Experience