David Mitchell Quotes

I want to be inside Nic Pizzolatto's brain.

I know how to write fiction well.

I love working fictional characters into a piece of history. It plays to my strengths, which are characterization and dialogue, and assists me in my admitted weakness, plot.

I just don't think I'm very good at fiction.

I'm always so inspired by Jeff Eastin's writing.

I'm becoming more of a novelist as I get older. The novel just seems the truer form. There's less artifice involved.

I don't think I have a very novelistic brain. I like to read, but I don't know if I could ever write a novel.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

It isn't as if a writer merely records life as it unfurls. Reality does not automatically transcribe as literature; real people are not shapely, compelling characters to be harvested. Charming facts and sharp observations rarely slide seamlessly into whatever narrative is at hand.

The novelist in me is probably hiding behind all the stories I write, looking for ways to connect them and continue the conversation with readers. Maybe I'm writing one long narrative, and each book, however different from the last, is just a chapter.

I think many people would say that writers like Stephen King have hypergraphia.

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

Writing a novel is not at all like riding a bike. Writing a novel is like having to redesign a bike, based on laws of physics that you don't understand, in a new universe. So having written one novel does nothing for you when you have to write the second one.

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.

When the narrative itself starts knocking on the glassed-in box that was your prescription for how you were going to write this novel... you have to listen to it.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

You have to have empathy, knowledge and compassion for your characters if you're a writer.

To write a story, I think you really have to open yourself up to the world.

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.

I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

Writing sketches, you're also learning about a journey and characters, and you translate that to bigger things.