Sarah Fielding Quotes

I talk to myself on paper about my characters - sometimes writing in first person... I keep lists of unanswered questions that I can always turn to in order to get myself going.

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

The head writer loves that my character is a boor.

When my lady and I sit down and watch TV, I find she gets annoyed at characters because they don't do what she would do in the situation. I'm always like, 'Well, she has to do that because that's what the story is.'

I wrote a novel. It's called 'The Middlesteins.' It's fiction. It's not a memoir. I'm not a spokesperson.

In my early 20s, connecting with fiction was a difficult process. There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to what was meaningful, what convinced, and what made sense.

People who read fiction are different from other people because they are people who are interested in an imagined world.

A book begins with an image or character or situation that I care about deeply.

I didn't have any particular talent for fiction. I took a class in college.

My favorite part is the preparation because you read on the page, you get this character.

What I've tended to do is to use my own experiences to get into someone else's mind, like in Wuthering Heights.

Read, read, read. Read good books. You will strengthen your understanding of story. Your vocabulary will be the richer for it.

Writing is truly a creative art - putting word to a blank piece of paper and ending up with a full-fledged story rife with character and plot.

I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer.

Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.

I like looking at a book and asking myself, 'How do I replicate that experience I just had as a reader?'

Fiction needs writers and readers, and writers should cultivate both.

We all know that I love writing Gambit.

Just like all my novels, 'Illusion' is a good way to observe where Frank Peretti was in his life when he wrote it.

A novel is no mere assemblage of gears; it is a wild and living being. And how are you to discern the intentions of a creature - to discover its true nature - other than by close and respectful observation?

As an actor, you use the things from yourself that you can apply to the character.

There are a million little things, but one of the best ways to get to know characters is to just put them in situations and see what they say.

I've never written a fiction before about real people. . . . I read everything that I could find by people who met them and tried to get some impression of them, but as always when you write fiction, even if you have completely fictitious characters, you start by thinking of what is plausible, what would they say, what would they be likely to do, what would they be likely to think. At some point, if it is every going to come to life, the characters seem to take over and start speaking themselves, and it happened with [COPENHAGEN].

There are three types of actions : purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous. Characters , to be immediate and apprehensible, must be presented by all three.

I do assume that a character or a place is inexhaustible and will always reward further attention.