authorial insight Quotes

When I was writing my first novel, 'Elizabeth is Missing,' I was writing the only novel I had ever written and writing about the only protagonist I'd ever written about. Because of this, I didn't think of her as a construct. Maud was real.

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

Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

Whenever I'm writing a book, small details from my life always creep in.

What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and then put in a huge amount of myself.

I always thought it hadn't influenced me very much, but I heard from many people from England that many motives from German fairytales are to be found in my books.

Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: 'My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasn't oo, squeezums?

How do you write? You write, man, you write, that's how, and you do it the way the old English walnut tree puts forth leaf and fruit every year by the thousands. . . . If you practice an art faithfully, it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up.

... characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

My writings are an exploration, and I think a lot of writers would tell you this, but in writing, you're not simply putting down things that are already known to you. You're actually discovering in the writing process, you're actually creating knowledge.

One must never judge the writer by the man; but one may fairly judge the man by the writer.

As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.

I have found that each of my books has developed out of something I have written in a previous book. Some thought evidently unfinished.

Plots are ... what the writer sees with.

We [me and Alison McGhee] probably wouldn't have said that when we were writing the stories, but it is so apparent to me in the finished product. For me, looking at Bink, it's like looking at myself on the page in a way that I've never experienced with any other book that I've written.

Authors frequently say things they are unaware of; only after they have gotten the reactions of their readers do they discover what they have said

Poetry forces a writer to condense and crystallise his thoughts and often represents a short cut to truths unsuspected by the author himself.

First drafts are for learning what your story is about.

By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State

I'm always talking to the writers because I find it so fascinating, how they're able to go to these different levels with the different stories, and have all these layers to peel back.

I remember having been with this book [Into the Forest] for a long time, and I remember the moment that she [Patricia Rozema] sent me the script and what it was like to read it for the first time. I just was so blown away by how she managed to capture the story and their relationship to each other, and the nuances of that.

The characters that I create are parts of myself and I send them on little missions to find out what I don’t know yet.

When I was writing 'The White Tiger' I lived in a building pretty much exactly like the one I described in this novel, and the people in the book are the people I lived with back then. So I didn't have to do much research to find them.

I guess I see a part of myself in everyone I write about. I tend to write about kids who are obsessed with something, and even though I have never been good with machines the way Hugo is, I did love miniature things when I was a kid.

I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.