Just live well. Just live

How is it possible to exist with so much pain?

There is a whole lot more to life than winning.

And it was suddenly very simple: There was no choice.

Know that you hold my heart, my hopes, in your hands.

Push yourself. Don't Settle. Just live well. Just LIVE.

You can only actually help someone who wants to be helped.

Astonishingly, not all girls get dressed just to please men.

But just as nature abhors a vacuum -- so does the human heart.

If the characters are compelling, readers will follow anywhere.

Only you, Will Traynor, could tell a woman how to wear a bloody dress.

You only get one life. It's actually your duty to live it as fully as possible.

I try to read writers who are better than me because it inspires me to be better.

If I don't cry while writing a key emotional scene, my gut feeling is it's failed.

There is a hunger in you. A fearlessness. You just buried it, like most people do.

Chick-lit may be staggering on its heels, but women's fiction is alive and kicking.

My go-to winter recipe is beef and butternut squash stew, cooked in the slow oven all day.

It's complicated.' 'So's quantitative easing. But I still get that it means printing money.

All that counts is the truth. Without it you're basically just juggling people's daft ideas.

When you put someone down all the time, eventually they stop listening to the sensible stuff.

We are all part of some great cycle, some pattern that it was only God's purpose to understand.

Cheap as chips, cheap as chips, it's a British expression. There's no couture in their darling.

Sometimes, Clark, you are pretty much the only thing that makes me want to get up in the morning.

How could you live each day knowing that you were simply whiling away the days until your own death?

I chose to believe that God, a benign God, would understand our sufferings and forgive us our trespasses.

I just... want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more.

I held him close and said nothing, all the while telling him silently that he was loved. Oh, but he was loved.

I always say that in any roomful of people, I could hive a novel out of any one person's family or life story.

Try to write at least 500 words a day. You may ditch 499 of them tomorrow, but you will still be moving forward.

I have always written. I was one of those kids who would always fill exercise books with girls and telepathic ponies.

Marriage is a decades-long experiment, conducted mostly in private; a test of will in the face of unexpected obstacles.

Love is the driver for all great stories: not just romantic love, but the love of parent for child, for family, for country.

We seem to live in an age where we are quietly appalled by the idea of appetites, whether they be for sex, food or diamonds.

I will never, ever regret the things I've done. Because most days, all you have are places in your memory that you can go to.

Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you still had your mother or father at your back, you'd be okay.

Nobody fights you like your own sister; nobody else knows the most vulnerable parts of you and will aim for them without mercy.

I wrote three books before I got one published. Most writers do. Have faith, and know that with each work you are getting better.

I thought, briefly, that I would never feel as intensely connected to the world, to another human being, as I did at that moment.

Real friends were the kind where you pick up where you'd left off, whether it be a week since you'd seen each other or two years.

He smelt of the sun, as if it had seeped deep into his skin, and I found myself inhaling silently, as if he were something delicious.

You have to write the story that's at the front of your head. There is no point in trying to write for the market; it won't ring true.

​​​​​​You're going to feel uncomfortable in your new world for a bit. It always does feel strange to be knocked out of your comfort zone.

Unless you sell millions, I think it's very hard as a writer not to feel anxious about what you put out. I always feel I could do better.

... if you're going to wear a dress like that you need to wear it with confidence. You need to fill it out mentally as well as physically.

There are normal hours, and then there are invalid hours, where time stalls and slips, where life---real life---seems to exist at one remove.

But don't blame me for the food. My wife knows a hundred and one ways to incinerate a cow, and as far as I can tell she's still experimenting.

She went kind of pink and laughed, the kind of laugh you do when you know yo shouldn't be laughing. The kind of laugh that spoke of a conspiracy.

I let him know a hurt had been mended in a way that he couldn’t have known, and for that alone there would always be a piece of me indebted to him.

Novelists seem to fall into two distinct categories - those that plan and those that just see where it takes them. I am very much the former category.

I worked out what would make me happy, and I worked out what I wanted to do, and I trained myself to do the job that would make those two things happen

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