Arthur Phillips Quotes

The language fictional characters use is chosen for effect, at least if the author is concentrating.

I think initially we wanted to use the first letter of the character's name. We thought S was perfect.

I purposely adopted a style in my storytelling wherein I don't have to explain everything or why the story is moving in a particular way.

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

Sometimes I aid into the confusion by having my character's name be my name.

It doesn't help for you to name a character's first name be Mindy and then be like, "I'm nothing like the character."

In my own writing, I think of myself as a realist who exaggerates a little.

I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.

I like the fact that by mimicking the way memory works, a writer can actually write in a fluid way - one solid scene doesn't have to fall on another solid scene, you can just have a fragment that then dovetails into another one that took place 30 years apart from it.

It took me years to learn that sentences in fiction must do much more than stand around and look pretty.

I think all writing is necessarily autobiographical to a greater or lesser extent, and the less it tries to be confessional, the more likely it is that you're somehow sneaking the things you need to say in there.

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

Ever since I began writing my Junie B. Jones series, people have been assuming that the character is based on me when I was a little girl. The fact is, though, that Junie B. and I have very little in common.

When I'd written my 'Silverwing' series - I'd imbued the bats with full human awareness and vocabulary.

At the same time, it's a family story and more of an epic. I needed the third-person. I tried to give a sense that Cal, in writing his story, is perhaps inventing his past as much as recalling it.

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

I had absolutely no trauma in my childhood. If anyone ever assumed that my books were autobiographical, they'd be sorely disappointed, because none of these things happened to me.

It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.

I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.

I think I would explode in flames of irony if I were to option an idea that I was satirizing in a novel.

Normally, I name my characters after famous comedians.

In 'The Plato Papers' I wanted to get another perspective on the present moment by extrapolating into the distant future. So in that sense, there's a definite similarity of purpose between a book set in the future and a book set in the past.

The portal structure is simply a technique: it is neither necessary nor unnecessary, except as the writer and the story make it so. In the case of 'The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant,' it was absolutely necessary to my intentions.

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.