Anthony Marra Quotes

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.

I feel like reading really defined me as a writer because I lived my life outside of my own body for so much of my life and I loved it. I've always been a reader. I think living all those stories served me to naturally take that next step to creating.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.

I had begun to write novels because of a fierce, self-serving impulse in my own heart. I had not considered the potential in a book for felt communion, the bright largesse of intimately participating in the lives of other people.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

I may attempt a novel. I think that no matter what you write, it requires being honest with oneself, and you have to pull yourself out of the whirlwind of daily life.

I read a lot of fiction.

I write because I have always been curious about what it would feel like to be someone else, in a different situation. Fiction is a wonderful way of exploring that.

I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn't have access to previously.

I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories.

You've got to live life to write a book about it.

The joy of great fiction is that it transports the reader to another world, where new characters live in otherwise unimaginable ways. It is one of the most powerful ways of generating empathy that I know.

You hear many things, take a little from each experience, and tune your imagination to create believable characters and situations.

Learned to read, and for a while as a kid, you think books are just leaves on trees. Then suddenly, you think a human being is making that, and maybe you could do that.

Find your own way into your story. Find your own way into your game.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

Everyone has early fiction fantasies, but it wasn't until my second child Betsy was born that I allowed the urge to write a novel bubble up.

English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.

I learnt to love reading. And then I started scribbling stories, and I liked that even more.

Sometimes I feel that the people I'm writing are more real to me than the people around me. When you take that imaginative leap, you're living so much in that world.

Each of my books is different. Deliberately... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.