Joanna Scott Quotes

In the early 1980s, I spent a year working as an assistant at the Elaine Markson Literary Agency.

But I think it's useful to note that at any particular point in our lives our minds are full not just of our own memories but of the experiences of characters from the books we've been reading. That's if we are lucky to have the education and leisure to read at all. And the curiosity

The novelist in me is probably hiding behind all the stories I write, looking for ways to connect them and continue the conversation with readers. Maybe I'm writing one long narrative, and each book, however different from the last, is just a chapter.

With prurient absorption and only minimal risk, we can pretend to be the subject of the lead article on the front page of the Style section of our local newspaper for as long as it takes to finish our morning coffee.

Writing that flirts with incoherence can just as readily flounder as writing characterized by simplicity and composure. There is no reliable formula for originality, and strategies that are distinguished as innovative in their first incarnation can quickly become stale in the hands of lesser artists.

The best liars lie with their eyes rather than with their words. This might put writers at a disadvantage.

I feel there has to be a certain amount of improvisation as I'm writing, which means any idea or any commitment to a project is risky. It involves time; it involves gathering of material, and sometimes it just doesn't work. Sometimes it does. As I'm starting out on a project, I can't tell if it will click or not.

How wonderful it would be to scatter words as they rise to consciousness, to let them lie where they fall.

I'm really such a bumbler! Writing fiction is like arranging furniture in a dark room. I can't see what I'm doing. I grope for the right words. I bump against the wrong words and stumble and stub my toe and curse and keep trying to guess what belongs in the space.

Jim Longenbach, poet, critic, and my husband, is always passing along life-changing books for me to read.

The past is full of examples of renegade writers who were overlooked in their time not only because their work didn't fit neatly into potted categories but also because they avoided the self-promotional efforts of their peers.

In the ongoing celebration that is literature, we are asked to imagine ourselves as other selves, for better or worse.

While it can be pleasurable to move speedily through a work of fiction, there's a different sort of pleasure to be had in lingering, backtracking, rereading the same page.

If the rules of a language are followed, words usually make sense. But these very rules can stir the impulse to rebel. We're obliged to keep trying to convey meaning through correct sentences. After a while, the good-soldier rigidity of polished prose can begin to seem dull, and it gets harder to resist the temptation of nonsense.

Whether art is defined as a representation of or response to reality, it demands an intense engagement with things we haven't managed to understand fully.

When we really start searching for the truth in stories, we can find it everywhere, not just in sincere confessions but in the deliberate lies and imagined possibilities, the magic and fantasy, and all the other unreal elements that go into the concoction of identity.