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
Right
Sentences
Many
Allowed
Needs
Keeps
Hammering
Coming
Paragraph
Wrong
Chapter
Times
Discouraged
Away
Chapters
Need
Sentence

More quotes by Tana French

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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.
Tana French
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Take what you want and pay for it, says God. You can have anything you want, as long as you accept that there is a price and you will have to pay it.
Tana French
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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.
Tana French
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I wasn't sure I could make it through another hour of his company without throwing my stapler at his head.
Tana French
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Regardless of the advertising campaigns may tell us, we can't have it all. Sacrifice is not an option, or an anachronism it's a fact of life. We all cut off our own limbs to burn on some altar. The crucial thing is to choose an altar that's worth it and a limb you can accept losing. To go consenting to the sacrifice.
Tana French
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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.
Tana French
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I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect.
Tana French
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Over time, the ghosts of things that happened start to turn distant once they've cut you a couple of million times, their edges blunt on your scar tissue, they wear thin. The ones that slice like razors forever are the ghosts of things that never got the chance to happen.
Tana French
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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.
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.
Tana French
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I came from a house full of books, so I took reading for granted. I was an outdoorsy little kid, too, so I got the best of both worlds by taking books up trees and reading there.
Tana French
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Here's a little tip for you. If you don't like being called a murderer, don't kill people.
Tana French
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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.
Tana French
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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.
Tana French
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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.
Tana French
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When you're too close to people, when you spend too much time with them and love them too dearly, sometimes you can't see them
Tana French
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If you're writing a scene for a character with whom you disagree in every way, you still need to show how that character is absolutely justified in his or her own mind, or the scene will come across as being about the author's views rather than about the character's.
Tana French
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Most people are only too delighted to wreck each other's heads. And for the tiny minority who do their pathetic best not to, this world is going to go right ahead and make sure they do it anyway.
Tana French
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I don't do that kind of negativity. If you put your energy into thinking about how much the fall would hurt, you're already halfway down.
Tana French
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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.
Tana French