Christopher Frewin

Science Fiction & Fantasy Writer

Quotations

Selections from my own work and the works of other writers.

  1. “A living is not a life.”

    Burrich, Assassin’s Quest, Robin Hobb

  2. There is a dead spot in the night, that coldest, blackest time when the world has forgotten evening and dawn is not yet a promise.

    Fitz, Assassin’s Quest, Robin Hobb

  3. Listening, reading, and seeing the arts will help you in your other arts.

    Christopher Frewin

  4. There can be no love without honesty.

    Vis, The Will of the Many, James Islington

  5. A scar is never the same as good flesh, but it stops the bleeding.

    Fitz, Assassin’s Quest, Robin Hobb

  6. Causation is divine as well as human.

    James Wood, How Fiction Works

  7. Great shafts of sunlight shone down on soil that had been shaded since before I was born.

    Fitz, Assassin’s Quest, Robin Hobb, p. 820

  8. “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”

    John Gould, as quoted by Stephen King in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

  9. “Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

    Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, Dune, Frank Herbert

  10. Red sank to ashes in the west, and ash-gray sank to black.

    Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

  11. I understood that the stables were Burrich’s treasure and home. He had come back to find both looted.

    Fitz, Royal Assassin, Robin Hobb

  12. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.

    Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

  13. It was a merry night and he was joyful to be there in the warmth and merriment, keeping festival with his companions.

    Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

  14. Somewhere above the trees, a full moon sailed.

    Fitz, Assassin’s Quest, Robin Hobb, p. 658

  15. One book at a time
    One scene at a time
    One word at a time

    Christopher Frewin

  16. That’s the thing about crying yourself to sleep. When you wake up, the problems are still there.

    Jazz, Artemis, Andy Weir, p. 150

  17. It had no hinges. No handle. No window or sliding panel.

    Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

  18. Writing can be simultaneously the best job in the world and the worst: on one end of the spectrum you have the writer whose work is read and enjoyed by innumerable people; on the other is the writer whose work—after months or even years of painstaking craft—remains unpublished.

    Christopher Frewin

  19. Fear feels remarkably like fear, regardless of the source.

    Fitz, Royal Assassin, Robin Hobb

  20. He could not exist a split man, his psyche constantly erasing and re-erasing the truth.

    R. F. Kuang, Babel

  21. Plot is reading; form is literary criticism.

    James Wood, How Fiction Works

  22. Regal glared at me, but I dared not move.

    “What will you make of him?”

    Regal looked perplexed. “Him? It’s the Fitz. Chivalry’s bastard. Sneaking and thieving as always.”

    “Fool.” King Shrewd smiled, but his eyes remained flinty. The Fool, thinking himself addressed, smiled sweetly. “Are your ears stopped with wax? Do you hear nothing I say? I asked you, not ‘what do you make of him?’ but ‘what will you make of him?’”

    Fitz, Assassin’s Apprentice, Robin Hobb

  23. He looked at me. His mouth moved. He called the wind. A leaf in lightning, I shook. And the thunderclap was black.

    Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

  24. The food lay in my stomach like so much gravel.

    Fitz, Royal Assassin, Robin Hobb

  25. “What’s in the box?”

    “Pain.”

    Paul Atreides and Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, Dune, Frank Herbert

  26. He could dwell on nothing.

    R. F. Kuang, Babel

  27. “Without all the drugs you can really feel it. Time escaping you.”

    The Woman in Cabin 10 (film)

  28. Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind.

    Paul Atreides, quoting the Orange Catholic Bible, Dune, Frank Herbert

  29. Suspicion is easy to prevent, far harder to dispel.

    Vis, The Will of the Many, James Islington

  30. “Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?”

    Ogion, A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin

  31. But Kettricken, I knew, served truth before politics.

    Fitz, Royal Assassin, Robin Hobb

  32. It starts with this: put your desk in the corner … Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.

    Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

  33. Mary Karr: “Don, I think I’m writing a bad book.”

    Don DeLillo: “Well, who doesn’t?”

    Mary Karr, recounting a conversation with Don DeLillo on The Tim Ferriss Show, episode 479

  34. …and on a grassplot a fountain played under young trees in the sunlight.

    Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

  35. “Riddles, dear Fitzy-fitz, are supposed to make folk think. To find new truths in old saws.”

    The Fool, Royal Assassin, Robin Hobb

  36. The bakery shop of English is rich beyond belief.

    Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft