Paul Whybrow's latest activity

“Adults who were hurt as children inevitably exhibit a peculiar strength, a profound inner wisdom, and a remarkable creativity and insight. Deep within them - just beneath the wound - lies a profound spiritual vitality, a quiet knowing, a way of...

“Sometimes a pessimist is only an optimist with extra information.” Idries Shah

“If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), "Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?" chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.” Steven Pressfield

“Every character has a back story. It’s what makes them fully formed and believable. But resist the urge to describe your character’s past with a data dump of everything they ever experienced since birth. The best way to reveal a character’s back...

"Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn "x" (t gts lttl hrdr f y dn't vn kn whr th vwls r)" Steven Pinker

I shy away from plot structure that depends on the characters behaving in ways that are going to eventually be explained by their childhood, or by some recent trauma or event. People are incredibly complicated. Who knows why they are the way they...

“A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story.” Isaac Babel

As a writer I believe that all the basic human truths are known. And what we try to do as best we can is come at those truths from our own unique angle, to reilluminate those truths in a hopefully different way. William Goldman

"Velcro: what a rip-off." Tim Vine

“Omission is sometimes a defect and leads to unclearness. But other times it's a virtue and leads to ambiguity and an increase in narrative tension.” George Saunders

'That's what literature is. It's the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! Listen to them!' Connie Willis

I wasn't allowed to be clever when I was young and blonde, but now I am 50 and an old blonde, I am allowed to have gravitas. With wrinkles comes wisdom. Mariella Frostrup

'I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.' Emily Dickinson

“I believe the second half of one’s life is meant to be better than the first half. The first half is finding out how you do it. And the second half is enjoying it.” Frances Lear

“And books, they offer one hope -- that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.” Anne Rice