Antonya Nelson Quotes

My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so: I am a storyteller.

If the book is a mystery to its author as she's writing, inevitably it's going to be a mystery to the reader as he or she reads it.

I wanted to learn about the worlds I wanted to write about in fiction.

What I have in mind when I start to write could fit inside an acorn-an acorn, moreover, that rarely if ever grows into an oak. Write fiction and you relinquish reason. You start with an acorn and you end up with a mackerel.

I have a different purpose in writing each novel. Some of them seem more similar than others, but the purposes are always different.

My characters, I find them as I'm writing. It's quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them.

What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not writing, it's deciding what to write.

A lot of novels use crime as a stepping stone to talk about greater issues. So I just think of myself as a writer.

Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in.

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

You either have an imaginative mind or you don't. All of my writing is God-given. I don't write my stories - they write themselves.

When you write a novel you have to live with the characters for a long time. So I prefer short stories. I never wrote anything more than 250 pages.

I sat down and tried to write a story. "Ian MacArthur is a wonderful sweet fellow who wears glasses and peers out of them with delight." That was the first sentence. The problem was that I just couldn't think of the next one. After cleaning my room three times, I decided to leave Ian alone for a while because I was starting to get mad at him.

Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.

In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.

Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.

I've often thought I would like to try to write a conventional novel, but I just don't know enough about the real world to write one.

I have to go with what I do, and what I do has more to do with what people say to each other than telling a story through images. Of course, you're trying to do both. And there are some people who are brilliant at it, but I don't consider myself to be particularly good at it. My mind gets into a verbal mode.

Words, living and ghostly, the quick and the dead, crowd and jostle the otherwise too empty corridors of my mind ... To move among this bright, strange, often fabulous herd of beings, to summon them at my will, to fasten them on to paper like flies, that they may decorate it, this is the pleasure of writing.

I sometimes have to write for a while before I figure it out, pretend that I know what I'm doing, sort of like ad-libbing on stage until you remember your line - you hope you sound convincing to the audience. The key is to have enough material, enough threads, so that there's something that can be satisfyingly drawn to a conclusion.

Writing fiction means putting a lot of what you believe about the world at risk, because you have to follow your characters.

Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you're a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.

If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.

I think fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition.