Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Tana French
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: May 10
Actor
Novelist
Stage Actor
Writer
Burlington
Vermont
Needs
Forty
Fifty
Nine
Terrible
Fine
Times
Need
Rewrite
Right
Paragraph

More quotes by Tana French

Image
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.
Tana French
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Tana French
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Tana French
Image
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
Image
Time works so hard for us, if only we can let it.
Tana French
Image
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.
Tana French
Image
Only teenagers think boring is bad. Adults, grown men and women who've been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God. Life has more than enough excitement up its sleeve, ready to hit you with as soon as you're not looking, without you adding to the drama.
Tana French
Image
I wasn't sure I could make it through another hour of his company without throwing my stapler at his head.
Tana French
Image
My memories of them had rubbed thin with overuse, worn to frail color transparencies flickering on the walls of my mind...
Tana French
Image
Here's a little tip for you. If you don't like being called a murderer, don't kill people.
Tana French
Image
I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect.
Tana French
Image
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
Image
When we can't see a pattern, we fit pieces together until one takes shape, because we have to.
Tana French
Image
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