Gustave Flaubert Quotes

It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God.

For me, writing stories is one way of feeling connected to the universe and God.

The creation by word-power of something out of nothing--what is that but magic? And, may I add, what is that but literature?

At one point it occurred to me that the title could make a more significant contribution to the storytelling process. It could act as a prologue.

Memory is a powerful thing for a writer.

It's good for a story to have a strong style.

Moviemaking is just really neat, and I really like doing that. I'd like to get into it more, but in terms of my role in all of this and in terms of the gift that God has given me, I had to come to the conclusion that my strength is as a storyteller, creating the story.

Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.

When you read 'author Katharine Holabird, creator of Angelina' and you're not even mentioned, you wince.

At writing workshops, they taught us to show, not tell - well, showing takes time.

Plays are the marathon of scriptwriting. You fix on a point somewhere in the middle distance, and you start running, and you don't stop until you get to the end. The theory is that you have something you cannot not say: this is the engine that propels you through to the last page.

I know this sounds weird, but I honestly believe music comes from the universe. Inspiration comes from the universe, and you drag it into your mind.

I do feel like that's what a writer does, is he goes into other people's heads.

I may have a story idea but everything starts moving when I am able to see my characters clearly. They then organically lead or respond to the story or the universe I want to create.

In my mind, there's usually a fairly definitive kind of narrative when I write. But I don't want to enforce that on other people. I think that's why I like using metaphor so much.

The power with which you can create a character is tremendous and probably more satisfying than actually being the person.

I'm not writing to encourage people to read my book or even books in general. That's not my job. My job is to write them. And if people want to read them, that's great.

I like to describe my characters as though they were all trapped in a glass box.

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

I sometimes imagine a great writer as a sort of God-surrogate: the writer is doing his or her human-best to emulate what God might think of is, if God was inclined to observe some human beings and present their activities in the form of a narrative.

The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.

All writing is by the grace of God. People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad. In these sentences that you show me, I can find no beauty, for I see death in every clause and every word. There is a fossil or a mummy character which pervades this book. The best sepulchers, the vastest catacombs, Thebes and Cairo, Pyramids, are sepulchers to me. I like gardens and nurseries. Give me initiative, spermatic, prophesying, man-making words.

I don't judge my characters, and that's my job not to judge them. It's my job to treat them with respect and to just look at it from their point of view.

On the whole, stories don't write themselves.

You might ask yourself why you want to surprise your readers in the first place. A surprise ending is sort of like a surprise party. Probably some people, somewhere, enjoy having friends and trusted colleagues lunge at them in the sudden blinding light of their own living room, but I don't think most of us do.