Wally Lamb Quotes

I read a quote to the effect that we are always writing about ourselves no matter what we're doing. That may be so.

For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.

Heaven knows, I've exposed myself in my novels through the use of fantasy and imagination... now my new book is about what really happened to me... not my heroines.

Recording is more autobiographical than acting. It's me - either how I'm feeling then or once felt at some point in my life. It's all me.

Every writer, to some extent, writes about himself.

There are always parts of me that come out in the characters that I play - it's the only thing I have to work with and to draw off of.

I've always written about things that cause me to feel something.

All my characters are me, in one way or another.

I decided with 'Savage Season' to use a lot of things in my life as the basis.

I write about different things. Anything that has affected me. Anything that I have liked. Anything that I feel strongly about. Any experience.

The portrait I do best is of the person I know best.

Most things I go through I have to write about.

All my movies have an autobiographical dimension, but that is indirectly, through the personages. In fact, I am behind everything that happens and that is said, but I am never talking about myself in first person singular.

There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.

Stories come to me and I don't know where they come from, but afterwards I can look back and say, 'Oh yes, that's got a little bit of me, or a little bit of my own son in it'. That's where ideas come from.

As a writer, you rely on whatever makes you up as a person, whether those things are twisted and nasty or otherwise.

The cool thing about being a songwriter, or a writer, I guess, in general, you can take on a lot of different things, experience a lot of different things, just by writing about them.

If I ever wrote a book, people would never believe it.

A work will only have deep resonance if the kind of darkness I can generate is something that is resident in me already.

I write from my life, my experience. I'm selfish that way.

It's the only way I really know how to tell the story is to be able to kind of live through the characters. So when I find something that resonates with me, it's usually because it cuts to something very real inside of me; something that I've gone through or experienced.

I write - though perhaps it sounds pretentious to say so - to make a clearing in the wilderness, to find out what I care about and what exactly to make of it.

The puppet characters were combinations of people I had known and to some degree aspects of my own personality. Weird was based on someone I knew in Chicago. Dirty Dragon was based on a good friend I had in Indianapolis.

Definitely, there is a sense in my writing that people now know me in a personal way. And to an extent, that's true because I write about very personal things, and I use the personal often to contextualize some of these sociopolitical issues that we're dealing with. And to an extent, they're right. They know something about me.

None of my own experiences ever finds its way into my work. However, the stages of my life - motherhood, middle age, etc. - often influence my subject matter.