Do you have a favorite quote about love? Or one about writing love stories or anything else?
For my first panel at the San Francisco Writers Conference, on writing dialogue, I didn’t have enough handouts for everyone, so I posted the handout here on 1st Books that evening, and printed out 50% more for my panel on writing love stories the next day … and then left them at home. So here is the missing handout, offered with thanks to the many lovely people I met at the conference. – Meg
10 Ways to Think about Love as You Write Love Stories
(from Folks Who Know of What They Speak)
“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”–Virginia Woolf
“I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.”–Marilyn Monroe
“I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”–Pablo Neruda
“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.”–William Shakespeare
“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”–Anaïs Nin
“The real lover is the man who can thrill you by kissing your forehead or smiling into your eyes or just staring into space.”–Marilyn Monroe
“I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”–Jane Austen
“You may not be her first, her last, or her only. She loved before she may love again. But if she loves you now, what else matters? She’s not perfect – you aren’t either, and the two of you may never be perfect together but if she can make you laugh, cause you to think twice, and admit to being human and making mistakes, hold onto her and give her the most you can.”–Bob Marley
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”–C.S. Lewis
“We love the things we love for what they are.”–Robert Frost
10 Things to Remember about Writing
(from Folks Who Know of What They Speak)
“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”–Eleanor Roosevelt
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”–Ernest Hemingway
“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”–Kurt Vonnegut
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”–Robert Frost
“Make up a story… For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.”–Toni Morrison
“You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads… may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”–Ray Bradbury
“Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.”–Sylvia Plath
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”–Mark Twain
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”–Anaïs Nin
