Madison Smartt Bell Quotes

In my own writing, I think of myself as a realist who exaggerates a little.

Point-of-view is a matter that readers rarely pay attention to, yet it's one of the most important story decisions an author makes.

There's a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That's what writers do when they're good.

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction.

I'm incapable of writing without social commentary. I like to think that it's integrated and not really heavy handedly didactic.

Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.

What do you know? Haven't you heard of suspension of disbelief?

I have deliberately left Sylvester and Julia's appearances to the reader's imagination.

Monsters are a storytelling tool, like domestic realism and close third.

With novels, you're representing things. You're not explaining.

I love J. G. Ballard. I love authors who take the world as we know it and just tweak one thing and say, 'What if the world were like this?'

Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.

I like to describe my characters as though they were all trapped in a glass box.

Well - when I write my book, and tell the tale Of my adventures - all these little stars That shake out of my cloak - I must save those To use for asterisks.

Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.

The temptation to vivify the tale and make it walk abroad on its own legs is hard to deny.

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

The Novelist, afraid his ideas may be foolish, slyly puts them in the mouth of some other fool and reserves the right to disavow them.

What do all my books have in common? A commitment to memory.

Writing a novel is a lot like reading one.

When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more ...exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.

I think it's really boring, from the point of view of the novelist, to write about yourself. Tedious. But that's very hard to explain to people who really don't believe in the possibility of invention.

Novels do take charge of the writer, and the writer is basically a kind of sheepdog just trying to keep things on track.

Whole swaths of the book [Lincoln in the Bardo] are made up of verbatim quotes from various historical sources, which I cut up and rearranged to form part of the narrative.