Janet Frame Quotes
Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.
For in spite of the snapdragons and the duty millers and the cherry blossoms, it was always winter.
I am not really a writer. I am just someone who is haunted, and I will write the hauntings down.
For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.
It would be nice to travel if you knew where you were going and where you would live at the end or do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we're always in other places, lost, like sheep.
There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.
So we went to bed, assaulted by sleep that fumed at us from medicine glasses, or was wielded from small sweet-coated tablets -- dainty bricks of dream wrapped in the silk stockings of oblivion.
...there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.
Divisions of the kind were fashionable at that time, and it was so easy to stifle one's need to help by deciding that help could neither be accepted nor understood.
It is always hard to believe that the will to change something does not produce an immediate change.
Timmy, who made a daring escape, also made a mistake of paying the taxi driver with a check made out of toilet paper.
All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land.
when I first began this diary I said I would give a record of my inner life. I begin to wonder if I have said anything about my inner life. What if I have no inner life?
Writing an autobiography, usually thought of as a looking back, can just as well be a looking across or through, with the passing of time giving an X-ray quality to the eye.
