Hector Tobar Quotes

I don't really approach stories to make them different from other stuff I've seen, I just try to get into the character, into his or her head. Try to make it as funny, as scary or as wild as I can so that I really like it.

As a writer, I have to show complexities. Through my writings, I hope to bring out people in different situations and not just one-dimensional beings.

When you've got good writing, you can kind of give up all the research, in a way, and start just following the emotional integrity of the journey of your character.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

I'm not an autobiographical writer, but I am a writer who deals with human emotion on all levels.

The stories I love the most are where the author has a lot of empathy for everyone. The author loves their characters and takes their situations really seriously, and you feel like you're just dropped into a different world.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

I become my characters, and then try to allow events in the story to take their own course. I try not to play God, but to let them work out their own destiny.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.

The novelist must ground his work in faithful study of human nature.

It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.

I love writing picture books and story books because of the exciting, visual life that artists and illustrators give to them. And most of all, I love writing novels because of the inner, emotional journeys that they take me on. Hopefully, the reader comes with me!

If the characters are not alive to me, it doesn't matter how good the sentences are. It just becomes all cake and no frosting.

Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me.

There are so many characters whizzing around inside my head, it's like Looney Tunes. But as soon as I've finished writing about them, I completely forget who they are.

Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves?

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.

That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.

As a novelist, I feel lucky that I can traffic in nuance. I'm more interested in looking at how things change over time, at how people try and sometimes fail to make meaning out of their lives.

As a former reporter, I wrote 'The Scarecrow' quickly - I didn't have to think about what the character would do the way I do with Harry Bosch.

Cinema and the arts invite viewers to focus on a story and, in doing so, peel away its layers and peer into the depths of the human soul.