Jonah Lehrer Quotes

I can't tell a story just by deciding to tell a story, do it in a didactic way. I need to have my own emotion, to feel, 'Wow, there is something I can discover, I can create.'

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

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

No two dramatists think or write alike. Ten thousand playwrights can take the same premise, as they have done since Shakespeare, and not one play will resemble the other except in the premise. Your knowledge, your understanding of human nature, and your imagination will take care of that.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.

I never think of an entire book at once. I always just start with a very small idea. In 'Holes,' I just began with the setting; a juvenile correctional facility located in the Texas desert. Then I slowly make up the story, and rewrite it several times, and each time I rewrite it, I get new ideas, and change the old ideas around.

As fiction writers, we are entertainers.

You start as an audience member and create a world you're interested in, and then you move into the telling of those stories, bringing what has interested you as an audience member.

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.

A lot of times as writers, you want to come up with the best possible story, and you bend it according to what you want to happen. I think one of the things that I always try to think about is what would really happen in a situation, what feels real.

My stories often begin with a situation or character rather than an insight about the human condition. It's always been difficult for me to write from an abstract idea, no matter how interesting or compelling I feel the idea might be.

For me, the best moments in storytelling are the ones where I feel I'm discovering something.

My number one goal has always been to try to tell interesting, cohesive, long-term stories.

I was an actor for a little bit. That's when I started to understand fiction - and that one of the great things about fiction is that you're dependent on the characters as much as they're dependent on you.

The story, not the money, excites me.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

Sometimes, I have themes that interest me or that touch on larger issues but, really, I'm just trying to figure out the plot, or how the characters work. I'm trying to make the best story I possibly can.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

If I ever wrote a script myself, it would be strongly emotional material.

I think a fictional invention grows according to its own development, not the author's. Characters in fiction are not simply as alive as you and me, they are more alive. Becky Sharp, Elizabeth Bennett, and Don Quixote may not outlive the burning out of the sun, but they will certainly outlive the brief candle of our lives.