Authorial Restraint Quotes

reading is not a passive act. It's a creative act. It's a relationship between the writer and a person the writer will probably never meet. I think it's very wrong to write in a way that leaves no room for the reader to maneuver. I don't want to get in the way. What I'd really like to do is to perform the Indian Rope Trick - go higher and higher and eventually disappear.

I become my characters, and then try to allow events in the story to take their own course. I try not to play God, but to let them work out their own destiny.

The writer's job is to let the books speak for themselves eventually.

With my characters, I prefer to not say too much, and in fact, I tend to cut down some of the lines in most scripts I get.

When you're writing non-fiction, you go as far as you can go, and then ethically you have to stop. You can't go. You can't suppose. You can't imagine. And I think there's something in human nature that wants to finish the story.

I don't think I will ever write about politics or foreign policy. I feel like there is so much good writing in those areas that I have little to add. I also like to steer clear of writing about people whom I do not personally like.

A writer should never mark the page with their own tears.

In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.

A plain narrative of any remarkable fact, emphatically related, has a more striking effect without the author's comment.

Yes, in my books I do edit myself to keep from becoming the Village Explainer.

A writer has to stand outside the page. It's not for the writer to shed tears onto the pages for these characters. It's not for him to suffer or to laugh or to experience ecstasy or agony in the manner of the characters on the pages.

As a writer, I always try as hard as possible to get out of the way of the story, so maybe that's the most important thing my readers should know - I'm all about the story, not about the ego.

This is the magnanimity of authorship, when a writer having a topic presented to him, fruitful of beauties for common minds, waives his privilege, and trusts to the judicious few for understanding the reason of his abstinence.

I let my characters do the talking, simple as that.

Any time you write history, you insert your opinion. You pick and choose what you are going to write about. I feel really happy not inserting myself. I spend too much of my life inserting myself. It's just great to let other people carry the narrative.

I feel like if you aren't honest and if you don't let go and ease up off of the narrator, then the story doesn't take up a life of its own, and the characters can't take up a life of their own. You handicap the story when you try to protect your characters.

I would not be like those Authors, who forgive themselves some particular lines for the sake of a whole Poem, and vice versa a whole Poem for the sake of some particular lines. I believe no one qualification is so likely to make a good writer, as the power of rejecting his own thoughts.

When using dialect, use it lightly. A dialect word here and there is enough. All you want to do is suggest. Never let it call attention to itself.

It's no use telling us that something was 'mysterious' or 'loathsome' or 'awe-inspiring' or 'voluptuous.' By direct description, by metaphor and simile, by secretly evoking powerful associations, by offering the right stimuli to our nerves (in the right degree and the right order), and by the very beat and vowel-melody and length and brevity of your sentences, you must bring it about that we, we readers, not you, exclaim, 'how mysterious!' or 'loathsome' or whatever it is. Let me taste for myself, and you'll have no need to tell me how I should react.

I feel really strongly about not wanting to overly guide the reader about what he or she should think. I really trust the reader to know for themselves and not to need too much. You have your own imagination, your own experiences, your own feelings, and a novel wants ultimately to ask questions. It doesn't assert anything, or shouldn't, I think.

Every one of his characters has their own idea, their own thing they want to express. Dostoevsky just lets them do it.