William Safire Quotes

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.

None of my own experiences ever finds its way into my work. However, the stages of my life - motherhood, middle age, etc. - often influence my subject matter.

I was looking to do something non-fiction because I had done a strip, 'My Mom Was a Schizophrenic.' I really enjoyed the process of doing that strip, despite its subject matter. To do it I'd had to do a lot of research and reading and I figured I'd like to do that again.

It's such a rich experience when you enter into a subject from a documentary point of view. It's hard for fiction to compete with that.

I want to tell stories for everyone, primarily.

Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.

I'm not very much of a reader really, because I find much of it very bad, very uninteresting, very speculative.

Proust, my big inspiration for 'Goon Squad,' uses music a lot in his novel, both in terms of plot and structure. I liked the idea of doing the same thing, which is one reason I structured 'Goon Squad' as a record album, with an A side and a B side, that's built around the contrasting sounds of the individual numbers in it.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

You can't write anything you want. Once you write that first chapter, then everything else is determined. You can write anything you want, but only one thing works.

I lay no claim, it should be clear, to being a historian. So in my books, the intimate and personal have been intertwined inextricably with the broad and historical.

I'm only a novelist on occasion. Many of my books are made up of brief texts collected together, short stories, or else they are books that have an overall structure but are composed of various texts.

I want readers turning pages until three o'clock in the morning. I want the themes of books to stick around for a reader. I'm always trying to find a way to balance characters and theme.

A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.

'The Crimson Petal and the White' is a book, and it will win or lose the trust of each reader when they begin reading its pages. That relationship will go on.

I look for two things when I am about to launch into a book. First, there has to be a dramatic arc to the story itself that will carry me, and the reader, from beginning to end. Second, the story has to weave through larger themes that can illuminate the world of the subject.

I was vested emotionally in 'Battlestar.' I really loved the thematic things. I don't feel it really got its shot, and I can't blame anyone else; I was at the center of that.

I can't sum up my books. They're all rather complicated. Sometimes I think they're too complicated. But that's the way I am. When I start to write a book, my head gets full of all kinds of detail.

All books should be trilogies; I mean I think we all agree on that.

It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.

The purely agitational attitude is not good enough for a detailed consideration of a subject.

I thought writing about somebody current would be a little closer to what I'm used to doing.

In non-fiction, I found John Gardner's two writing books to be tremendously helpful.

My poems tend to have rhetorical structures; what I mean by that is they tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There tends to be an opening, as if you were reading the opening chapter of a novel. They sound like I'm initiating something, or I'm making a move.