Asne Seierstad Quotes

A sports writer is a stylist of some kind. He is trying to convey mood and character and emotion.

I've got to hear the rhythm of the sentences; I want the music of the prose. I want to see ordinary things transformed not by the circumstances in which I see them but by the language with which they're described. That's what I love when I read.

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

Never open a book with weather. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

I always kind of think I don't have a style, just whatever seems to be appropriate for the story.

I changed my writing style deliberately. My first two novels were written in a very self-consciously literary way. After I embraced gay subject matter, which was then new, I didn't want to stand in its way. I wanted to make the style as transparent as possible so I could get on with it and tell the story, which was inherently interesting.

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

Knut Hamsun's writing is magical. His sentences are glowing; he could write about anything and make it alive. Of contemporary writers, Thure Erik Lund is my definite favorite.

I just love details; I love trying to make the reader smell what I was smelling at the time and see what I was seeing. Textures, too - all that kind of stuff is probably my strong suit as far as my writing goes, I would say.

It's hard to write an Evan Hunter novel because I really am starting from scratch. I'm assuming a new voice each time. The McBain voice is set.

What Bradbury had that most other science-fiction writers didn't have at that time was a love for beautiful language, evocative description, and haunting phrases that would stick with the reader.

If I had to write long-form stuff with descriptions of rooms, it would be so boring for me. I like writing dialogue and jokes and situational stuff.

I'm trying to move a little more toward literary fiction while still retaining a popular feel.

I purposely adopted a style in my storytelling wherein I don't have to explain everything or why the story is moving in a particular way.

Ray Bradbury taught me the importance of metaphor and simile and poetic style.

I never want to tell a story where I'm lecturing to the audience.

You always need to make sure that you're looking at every angle and every perspective so that people, when they read the story, know what's happening. You have to write for everyone.

I am a writer who happens to use some tools of journalism.

I knew how to write like an academic, so I knew how to write academic papers and essays and things. But the things that are great for an essay are unbearable in narrative writing.

I rather envy writers who do variations on a theme. I like reading those books, but in practice, I can't do it.

I think when I first started out, I had a kind of an exuberance about language, comedy, narrative leaps that... stopped just short of non sequiturs. And I'm much more cautious now.

You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice.

I come from the best era of film I believe; when people were taking chances on films. It's time for us to bring more truth to the story and not necessarily carry a torch for every Black person in America; just tell a story, and a good one too.

I try not to be too plot-heavy and to balance the dramatic with the comedic.

We each create a story - a narritive, a picture, an allegory, a model - for what's going on in the universe. And then we fight - sometimes to the death - to make others believe in that model, or to be able to keep believing in it ourselves. In other words, we try to erase contradictory evidence to that model.