World of Books and Travel

1. “Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.” -                Anais Nin 2. “As a writer you should not judge. You should understand.”      -           Ernest Hemingway 3. “Talented writing makes things happen in the reader’s mind — vividly, forcefully — that good writing, which stops with clarity and logic, doesn’t.”     -       -  Samuel Delaney 4. “Short stories demand a certain awareness of one’s own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.” -             Joan Didion           5.    All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and sur...

O.Henry, the popular American short story writer, says the following about the secret of Short Story writing. O.Henry was the pseudonym of William Sydney Porter (1862-1910). "I'll give you the sole secret of short-story writing, and here it is: Rule 1. Write stories that please yourself. There is no rule Rule 2. The technical points you can get from Bliss Perry. If you can't write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public." Some of his popular short stories - An Afternoon Miracle A Car Loan The Detective Detector Hearts and Hands The Indian Summer of Dry Valley Johnson The Last Leaf

1. “A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.” —Thomas Hardy 2.“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.” —Oscar Wilde 3.“Begin with an individual, and before you know it you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find you have created—nothing.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald 4.“Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.” —Philip Roth 5.“If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.” —Margaret Atwood 6.“It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer.” —Gerald Brenan 7. “Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think about what you shall write.” —William Cobbett 8.“Love is the only energy I’ve ever used as a writer. I’ve never written out of anger, although anger has informed love.” —Athol Fugard