Hector Tobar Quotes

I love the written word so much, I know it's gonna flow naturally.

I tell people you should write what you love to read because that's where your passion is.

When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want.

Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.

Writing is my No. 1 passion.

When you compose, it's like writing. You're like a writer. You just think all the time.

I think writing gives me creative freedom.

You care a lot about these stories you're writing, and you hope that someone else will care, too.

To some degree, I consider myself a writer, and so I have a strong relationship with literature.

I've always been a writer. I've always loved words, ever since I was a kid.

I'm constantly creating and writing.

The thing to remember when you're writing is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader.

It is in the hard, hard rockpile labor of seeking to win, hold, or deserve a reader's interest that the pleasant agony of writing again comes in.

The inspiration for my novels comes from the depths of a creative well, based on asking myself questions over and over. I try to write something different each time I sit down to write; I try to surprise the readers.

I almost always write everything the way it comes out, except I tend much more to take things out rather than put things in. It's out of a desire to really show what's going on at all times, how things smell and look, as well as from the knowledge that I don't want to push things too quickly through to climax; if I do, it won't mean anything. Everything has to be earned, and it takes a lot of work to earn.

The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.

A lot of people think that they are really cool because they don't outline. In my writing group, they would say, "I will never outline. I let the characters take me." C'mon, man - I outline the story, but it's only like one page. It's a list of possible reversals in the story, like things where everything will just change because of this certain reveal or this certain action. Then I start really digging into the character because, to me, I don't care what the story is.

Writing simply means no dependent clauses, no dangling things, no flashbacks, and keeping the subject near the predicate. We throw in as many fresh words we can get away with. Simple, short sentences don't always work. You have to do tricks with pacing, alternate long sentences with short, to keep it vital and alive.... Virtually every page is a cliffhanger--you've got to force them to turn it."~

Good writers are in the business of leaving signposts saying, Tour my world, see and feel it through my eyes; I am your guide.

I wish I could be a better writer, but writing is so difficult. I get seduced by visual aesthetics. Because I just like making beautiful pictures, sometimes I wander away from making a clear statement.

I think I'm too lazy a writer to do something like historical fiction. You have to do so much research. I just write what I know.

Casting a film is to me one of the most important things next to the writing. If you cast it properly everything takes place very easily. If you cast it improperly you're fighting an uphill battle.

Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.

My writing is of a very different kind from anything I've heard about. All this mythological material is out there, a big gathering of stuff, and I have been reading it for some forty- or fifty-odd years. There are various ways of handling that. The most common is to put the material together and publish a scholarly book about it. But when I'm writing, I try to get a sense of an experiential relationship to the material. In fact, I can't write unless that happens ... I don't write unless the stuff is really working on me, and my selection of material depends on what works.

I think precision in writing goes hand in hand with not trying to say everything. You try and say two-thirds, so the reader will involve himself or herself.