Padgett Powell Quotes

I wrote a novel. It's called 'The Middlesteins.' It's fiction. It's not a memoir. I'm not a spokesperson.

There are a lot of good stories out there, but I haven't found too many great scripts.

When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again.

I am a comic writer, which means I get to slay the dragons, and shoot the bull.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms.

I don't assume, because I can write screenplays, that I know how to write a novel. It's a very different world. There's a craft involved in storytelling, and it's a different kind of craft. But yes, someday I will do that. It just might be awhile.

When I went to university in Colorado, I was encouraged to write very innovative, experimental things, and some of the short stories in 'Bearded Ladies' are a little bit experimental.

I'm trying to move a little more toward literary fiction while still retaining a popular feel.

I love to read the kind of books I write. Genre-breaking. Fresh-concept. World-building. My all-time top three authors would have to be Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Harris, and Pat Conroy.

When television gets in trouble is when it forgets that it all begins with the written word.

I have a novel out, 'Lupus Rex,' that I wrote and am excited about that.

I find most 'rules' about how to write a 'good story' confining, and I enjoy writing stories that don't look like stories at all on the surface.

I'm not as worried about the process of writing, simply because I think I've got that one down, you know? I think I know what brings specificity to these ideas, what brings specificity to the genre elements, or anything else, and it's personal emotions.

To me, a good storyteller should be able to tell stories across genres.

It always comes down to script and characters.

We all have great faith in the writing team that puts together 'Heroes.'

A novel is no mere assemblage of gears; it is a wild and living being. And how are you to discern the intentions of a creature - to discover its true nature - other than by close and respectful observation?

People, certainly in the U.K., look down on screenwriting as an art form, but I love the discipline of it. Next to the bagginess of novel writing, it almost feels like a martial art.

There are many oral historians in America, but my books are made using the rules of novel writing. I have a beginning, a plot, characters.

I never set out to write a script that is 'topical.'

Faulkner wrote for film, and his ear is just impeccable.

With non-fiction, there is the struggle to be accurate. With fiction, it is a bit different: the desire to let imagination take you to new places.

You spend so much time as a writer telling straight and linear stories.

I just read the script; everything else just follows. Content is the most important thing for me.