Nell Freudenberger Quotes

From an early age, my favorite thing to read was novels. For years, when I was writing only nonfiction, still I was reading almost exclusively novels. It's weird to be producing something that you don't consume. It feels really alienating.

I feel like my brain is more geared towards a novel than it is to a movie.

I'm not a biographer, I'm a novelist.

The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.

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

My novels are all ideas.

Novels will remain my meat and potatoes, what sustain me imaginatively.

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty.

No matter how close to personal experience a story might be, inevitably you are going to get to a part that isn't yours and, actually, whether it happened or not becomes irrelevant. It is all about choosing the right words.

Both types of books - fiction and nonfiction - are a search for story. As a writer and a reader, there's nothing I crave more than a good story!

To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

I do think that short story writing is often a matter of luck.

In my mind, there's not a great difference between what people call fiction and non-fiction. So in that sense, I'm like an early-18th-century person. I actually believe there's one way of writing.

I am really excited by the form of short fiction.

I've been into short stories ever since I read an Angela Carter collection when I was a teenager.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

For me, inspiration isn't a sort of spark which lights the fire of the story. It's more like a thread, one of many, which you can tease out of a story once it's written, if you feel so inclined.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.