Quote

Don't get discouraged if you're hammering away at a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter, and it keeps coming out wrong. You're allowed to get it wrong, as many times as you need to you only need to get it right once.

Tana French

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Tana French
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: May 10
Actor
Novelist
Stage Actor
Writer
Burlington
Vermont
Needs
Keeps
Hammering
Coming
Paragraph
Wrong
Chapter
Times
Discouraged
Away
Chapters
Need
Sentence
Right
Sentences
Many
Allowed

More quotes by Tana French

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I like writing about big turning points, where professional and personal lives coalesce, where the boundaries are coming down, and you're faced with a set of choices which will change life forever.
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You don't have to like your family, you don't even have to spend time with them, to know them right down to the bone.
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I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn't find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.
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I weaned myself on the nostalgia equivalent of methadone (less addictive, less obvious, less likely to make you crazy): missing what I had never had.
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I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.
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Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.
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I can't explain the alchemy that transmuted one evening into the equivalent of years held lightly in common. The only way I can put it is that we recognized, too surely even for surprise, that we shared the same currency.
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But give me more credit than that. Someone else may have dealt the hand, but I picked it up off the table, I played every card, and I had my reasons.
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Don't you ever feel that - that you just need to get away? From everything? That it's all too much?
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My memories of them had rubbed thin with overuse, worn to frail color transparencies flickering on the walls of my mind...
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Sometimes, when you're close to someone, you miss things. Other people can see them, but you can't.
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I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack
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One of my da's tragedies was always the fact that he was bright enough to understand just how comprehensively he had shat all over his life.
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I had always felt that I was an observer, never a participant that I was watching from behind a thick glass wall as people went about the business of living--and did it with such ease, with a skill that they took for granted and that I had never known.
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When I was acting, I got trained in creating a character as a three-dimensional person. If you're doing it right you should be able to draw an audience into the character's world and make them feel their fears.
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When we can't see a pattern, we fit pieces together until one takes shape, because we have to.
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For a moment, I felt as if the universe had turned upside down and we were falling softly into an enormous black bowl of stars, and I knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be alright.
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Being easily freaked out comes with its own special skill set: you develop subtle tricks to work around it, make sure people don't notice. Pretty soon, if you're a fast learner, you can get through the day looking almost exactly like a normal human being.
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I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect.
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If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that's fine you only need to get it right once.
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