Dennis Lehane Quotes

The great pleasure for me in writing short stories is the fierce, elegant challenge.

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.

I wonder if it's in the nature of fiction writers to never quite see their own lives as 'real,' since we are always making stuff up!

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

Stephen King has inspired me with his humor and honesty, and his admonition that the author's job is to tell the truth.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

Well, to be honest I think I'm a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought - whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days.

I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

I am also working on a couple of short stories for anthologies. This is new to me and I'm enjoying it.

When I'm writing fiction I'm thinking, God, this is so hard - I have to make all this stuff up! I wish I were writing a nonfiction book where all the facts are laid out and I don't have to be so much at sea.

I like going back and writing fiction.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

All of my novels are seeded in real life events, and 'The Wreckage' is no different.

I tell stories. I kind of stumbled on that by trying to combine Jane Austen and magic.

I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.