120 quotes found
“A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.”
“And who would dare write their own death into the script so that the rest of the characters in the tale might live? God of course.”
“The only way you can talk about this great tide in which youre a participant is as Schopenhauer did: the universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too.”
“The best stories come from deep within us and are of us. Either our inner child comes out to play and makes all things possible, or we mold our characters and events from our own experiences, or ou...”
“It seems to me that you might create any sort of character in a novel and there would be at least one person in the world just like him. We humans are simply incapable of imagining non-human action...”
“Characters have to be seen and felt when written, not told about. Writers are merely vessels of their manifestations.”
“They say a writer is not a single person, it is a bunch of characters. What I learned from life is that everyone is a bunch of characters, characters who live and die within us. The moment I was ra...”
“...it's not the stories - it's the pain and the joy and the people who stay with you long after the stories are told ...”
“One of the most dangerous of literary ventures is the little, shy, unimportant heroine whom none of the other characters value. The danger is that your readers may agree with the other characters.”
“I write about scoundrels; my specialty is generally scoundrels. If somebody's done a bad thing, I just talk about it. I don't prettify it or anything. My characters, a lot of them are disgusting w...”
“In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists. We know each other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well enough as a b...”
“God is the source of life, honour and wealth.”
“Anyone can be a story. Everyone is.”
“A book is simply a snap shot of the full story.”
“You can never know enough about your characters”
“And the only sign of life is the ticking of the pen, introducing characters to memory like old friends.”
“You can't write a sory until you've felt. Breathe it in. Walked with your characters. Talked with them. That's why you come here. To live your story.”
“Discover everything about your characters that you can before you write your story. If you get stuck at any point, they will write your dialog for you.”
“The driver, a black silhouette upon his box, whipped up his bony horses. Icy silence in the coach. Marius, motionless, his body braced in the corner of the carriage, his head dropping down upon his...”
“When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness...”
