Anne Rice Quotes

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

I'm a strange kind of author - I like assignments. I wasn't clever enough to invent an iconic figure like Salander, but she's my kind of girl.

I would like to write a book that wasn't so violent and weird, but I just don't think I can do that with my talent. I don't think it would come off.

My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

When it comes to the form the narrative will take, whether first person, third person, or Aunt Grace's cat, I usually find that the story tells me which voice it prefers, and that often changes as I go along. And in the end it really doesn't matter as long as the author can rig those voices all in harness to pull the same load.

Usually, when I write a novel, it takes me about 100 pages to figure out the voice of the narrator.

You spend so much time as a writer telling straight and linear stories.

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

Certainly 'The Judgment of Paris' was the novel in which I found my own voice.

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.

My preferred style is to write in first person, so I always have to play around with possible narrator voices until I find something that works.

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'm here to get the story on to the page. It would be good to catch your attention, and I have to make you want to read on, and I suppose I prefer you don't actually think about the 'how' at all - the writing technique, the 'style', or even who it is that's putting this together.

I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

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

Stephen King has inspired me with his humor and honesty, and his admonition that the author's job is to tell the truth.

I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.

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'm a novelist. I'm not a crusader, and I'm not an editorial writer. And I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.

I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.

I write the story as it comes to me - YA is my natural voice, not a conscious choice.

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.

The novels take longer to write than the picture book texts, and they do take a different sort of concentration. However, a very short, simple story that works well is just as exciting to me as any longer and more complex book.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.