“What makes the desert beautiful,” said the little prince, “is that somewhere it hides a well.”

-The Little Prince

“A novel is a game for two players.” –Lindsay Clarke (I think.)

And the second player can be the writer, reading years later.

. . . the long, peopled novel, full of many lives, many beginnings and endings . . .

–James Woods

Writing stories involves gauging what to show via scenes with more detail, and what to tell via a faster-moving summary.

–Derek Neale

Worldbuilding happens as readers watch characters interact with the world throughout the plot.

a paraphrase of Allison K Williams

Plot, in fact, is yearning challenged and thwarted.

–Robert Olen Butler

At high noon in a village deep in the marshes, in what seems to Fetter to be the uttermost depths of this wild valley, in a village of three faded-grey tents that doesn’t deserve the name–it has no sentry box and the bicycle ruts approaching it have almost faded away–set in a small area of cleared damp earth surrounded by writhing mangrove swamps on all sides, a familiar face finds him and asks for an exorcism.

The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

Nabokov’s definition of aesthetic bliss: “a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.” 

If you spend enough time with a story, it will reveal all of the secrets of its construction.

Aaliyah Bilal

“Good stories slip past our defenses—we all want to know what happens next—and then slow time down, and compel our interest and belief in other lives than our own, so that we feel ourselves in another presence. It’s a kind of awakening, a deliverance, it cracks our shell and opens us up to the truth and singularity of others—to their very being.”

Tobias Wolff