Jen Lancaster Quotes

It makes me nuts, the idea that if you put a political struggle at the heart of your book, then it has to be that the author - me - is trying in some way to push my views onto my readers.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

I have always loved story - I escaped within it as a child, I read every day, I love figuring out the complex layers of an author's work.

Literature, of course, is not a contest.

I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.

I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

The only books I give up on are texts where the writer's attention is concentrated so heavily on narrative questions that his or her use of language becomes careless.

I don't write fight scenes in comics all that well. I think they're a waste of space unless they can move a story forward in some compelling fashion. You've only got twenty-two pages to work with. Why throw that away on a set of meaningless punches?

I don't think there is a single sentence in this whole book [East of Eden] that does not either develop character, carry on the story or provide necessary background.

The number 1 thing that I don't want to see in a story is when characters exist simply to be proven wrong.

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

I think, about the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. Fiction is not really about anything: it is what it is. But nonfiction - and you see this particularly with something like the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction - nonfiction we define in relation to what it's about. So, Stalingrad by Antony Beevor. It's "about" Stalingrad. Or, here's a book by Claire Tomalin: it's "about" Charles Dickens.

Every episode has a purpose to move the story forward.

On film, it's really nice to see that transformation from the beginning, reading the script, to know where he starts and where he ends, and be able to plan for that.

Every story starts with an idea, but it is the characters that move this idea forward.

My stories do have plot. They're not just scattered language; they're controlled, toward an end.

The political is not compatible with the artistic, because the former, in order to prove, has to be one-sided.

The story itself should force its moral upon you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story.

A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell them to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.

What interests me about fiction is plot. And what interests me about plot is whether someone tells a story that moves me within the constraints of storytelling. And I have narrowly defined storytelling.

Fiction is the microscope of truth.

When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.

The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own.

The Israel stories were really hard for me to write, because I think that my book is very much about politics, but it isn't political. It really was important for me to not have a political agenda at all, because I have a hard time stomaching any political fiction that feels message-y.

I'm not trying to convey a message, I'm just trying to tell a story.