Olivier Dahan Quotes

I'm here to get the story on to the page. It would be good to catch your attention, and I have to make you want to read on, and I suppose I prefer you don't actually think about the 'how' at all - the writing technique, the 'style', or even who it is that's putting this together.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.

People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.

If you write a story based on a real person, you're trapped by the details of the real person and his life. It gets in the way of writing your own story.

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

I lay no claim, it should be clear, to being a historian. So in my books, the intimate and personal have been intertwined inextricably with the broad and historical.

I've never been able to write narrative as a character, really. Jenny Lewis, I love her stuff, I love that she can weave these American Gothic fairytales. I feel like I sound inauthentic when I do that, so I tend to write from a personal standpoint.

I'm not seeking for answers; I just want to tell stories and state my opinion.

To me, I'm a storyteller.

The most serious problem doing biography is the matter of time because you have to shape events into a narrative of two hours; you have to create a dramatic arc. That can be a challenge.

I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.

I sometimes say that I don't make anything up - obviously that's not true. But I am uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someone who is telling the story of his life, which may be exaggerated and even have lies in it, but I want to hear the true story, essentially.

I think of myself as a storyteller, and that is it.

Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.

Because the kind of nonfiction I write has a plot, the events and transactions that make up a life, nonfiction offers me a break from plotting.

First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.

I have had the unfortunate experience of having someone write an unauthorised biography of me. Half of it is lies and the other half is badly written. My feeling is that if I'm going to write my life story, I ought to have my life first.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

The point of my explanation is I'm very subjective when it comes to describing my characters: they are all a little bit a part of me from the outside in or the inside out - but to put your mind at ease, I built Paul Snider from the outside in.

It seems to me that you would have to write a novel on a very small, intimate scale for it not to become political.

I'm a fiction writer, and fiction is telling the lives of unreal people. But the only way you can learn to do that well is by really understanding the lives of real people.

It's a huge responsibility writing about people who are alive. It's the thing about writing that keeps me awake at night: dramatising real-life events with real people.

It's a very weird thing, making a true story, because you need your freedom, as filmmakers, to do what you need to do.

Most of my characters are an amalgamation of people that I've met, my family, or myself. Being a writer, you can draw only from what you know. I am lucky to have really rich and interesting people in my family for, you know, interesting family nights and great characters.