In literature only trouble is interesting. It takes trouble to turn the great themes of life into a story: birth, love, sex, work, and death.
Janet BurrowayWhat matters is not publication or success (success is bad for your prose) but the practice of the imaginative act. Our damaged values depend on it.
Janet BurrowayThe only justification for writing a novel is that it should be wonderful. Adequate is inadequate.
Janet BurrowayThe mystique and the false glamour of the writing profession grow partly out of a mistaken belief that people who can express profound ideas and emotions have ideas and emotions more profound than the rest of us. It isn't so. The ability to express is a special gift with a special craft to support it and is spread fairly equally among the profound, the shallow, and the mediocre.
Janet Burroway