Authorial Power Quotes

How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.

The writer is the engineer of the human soul.

For the most part, my characters don't talk to me. I like to lord over them like some kind of benevolent deity. And, for the most part, my characters go along with it. I write intense character sketches and long, play-like conversations between me and them, but they stay out of the book writing itself.

To be a film director is not a democracy, it's really a tyranny. You're the head of the project, for better rather than worse. I write the film and I direct the film, I decide who's going to be in it, I decide on the editing, I put in the music from my own record collection.

When I am at home writing, I have all the power. I am God. But TV is a polytheistic universe.

I feel like an emperor only when I'm writing.

Ultimately, I'm in control of what's going on in the books, so I can back off, if it's scaring me too much.

The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature.

Trust me, I'm telling you stories. ... I can change the story. I am the story.

Because characters are your creations, you are the one who ultimately gets to decide their fate.

I wish I had more control, more like Edgar Rice Burroughs had, but I'm a realist, too. I work in television. I don't know that I would want to spend the rest of my life controlling my characters.

Novels give you the opportunity to create a whole world. Because you create people, you make them talk... You decide who they are, whether they live or die. It's the closest thing to feeling like a god that you can come to.

Vade Mecum I want the scissors to be sharp and the table perfectly level when you cut me out of my life and paste me in that book you always carry.

Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest.

When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want.

How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?

Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking.

Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.

It's the prerogative of the writer to rewrite the world into one he would like to exist.

As a writer, you have to be mean and vicious. Use the pen as your gun. Sometimes the people you write about get hurt.

The moment we begin tolerating meanness, in ourselves and others, we are using our authorial power in the service of wrongdoing. We have both the capacity and the obligation to do better.

A woman journalist in England asked me why Americans usually wrote about their childhood and a past that happened only in imagination, why they never wrote about the present. This bothered me until I realized why - that a novelist wants to know how it comes out, that he can't be omnipotent writing a book about the present, particularly this one.

You have to understand that people feel threatened by a writer. It's very curious. He knows something they don't know. He knows how to write, and that's a subtle, disturbing quality he has. Some directors without even knowing it, resent the writer in the same way Bob Hope might resent the fact he ain't funny without twelve guys writing the jokes. The director knows the script he is carrying around on the set every day was written by someone, and that's just not something that all directors easily digest.

A novelist can shift view-point if it comes off. ... Indeed, this power to expand and contract perception (of which the shifting view-point is a symptom), this right to intermittent knowledge - I find one of the great advantages of the novel-form ... this intermittence lends in the long run variety and colour to the experiences we receive.