Lesli Linka Glatter Quotes

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

If you're writing a novel, you can afford to see where the spirit takes you, but in terms of structure and engineering with a screenplay, you have to be quite pragmatic; otherwise, it will run away from you.

Writing a screenplay is so spare, it kind of reminded me that I really should celebrate what I can do in a book, which is description: for example, places, people, locations.

As a writer of fiction, you don't ever want to limit the characters you create to the life you've lived. That's insanity to me.

It always comes down to script and characters.

I'm always excited about stories that allow me to explore a character and create interesting stories and worlds that we haven't seen before.

I may have a story idea but everything starts moving when I am able to see my characters clearly. They then organically lead or respond to the story or the universe I want to create.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone else.

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

That's the way it happens - some characters you set out to use, some are happy accidents. As long as it works, it doesn't really matter how you got them.

I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.

I can move my characters through it easily, because I understand the background; I've really studied it.

I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.

Good scripts and interesting stories are hard enough to find.

Especially when I write, I want to get out of people's heads and have them speak and have them get dressed and have them go to work.

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

I'd love to work with Aaron Sorkin on something. Just the way he writes, he has no fear in writing people that are fiercely intelligent, and I love that.

When you have really good writing, you're compelled by the actors who are in it, and you may think it's the actors or the design or the filmmaking of it, but then you're like, 'Well, the base is a really rich story that these guys have created.'

I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

I write the kind of stuff I'd like to watch.

The lovely thing about writing is, well, two things. One, writing fiction allows us to bring an order to our lives that doesn't exist in real life. And two, it allows us to create human characters that we know better than we will ever know anyone in real life.

James Salter is a consummate storyteller. His manners are precise and elegant; he has a splendid New York accent; he runs his hands through his gray hair and laughs boyishly.