Quotes – Page 3 – Annabel Smith

How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists…

The most important thing of all in dialogue is not the text at all, but the subtext. That’s where the deeper meaning is…

I’m amazed at the ease with which we forget what we felt, what we wanted. The speed with which we assume that now…

Perhaps, the only fiction worth reading – the writing that ensnares you wholly, that lays siege to your heart – is that which…

Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn’t struck you….

The best thing I’ve done in recent years has been to… re-read certain books with dedication, with an old fidelity, as if something…

I’m waiting for a voice. A voice that isn’t mine. An old voice, novelistic and solid. Alejandro Zambra, Ways of Going Home

Love is not what we think it will be, we can’t imagine what it will do to us going in, we can’t imagine…

Sometimes when we write, we wash everything clean, as if by doing so we could advance toward something. We ought to simply describe…those…

Rejection has value. It teaches us when our work or our skillset is not good enough and must be made better… Rejection refines…

Annabel Smith