Mark Kurlansky Quotes

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

Sometimes, I have themes that interest me or that touch on larger issues but, really, I'm just trying to figure out the plot, or how the characters work. I'm trying to make the best story I possibly can.

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

Ideas come from all over, but as I write more and more, I find I'm always hunting for mood: I want to write a novel with a pervasive mood that sticks with you after you close the cover.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

It's hard to write a good plot, it's very hard.

When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want.

Every creative story is different. And yet every creative story is the same: There was nothing, now there is something. It's almost like magic.

I only have one job, and that's being a storyteller.

I think all good short stories are about what it means to tell a good story.

My number one goal has always been to try to tell interesting, cohesive, long-term stories.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

I just want to tell a good story, so I always ask myself, 'Are these people real to me?'

To me the most important thing is a good story, though I know how cliche that sounds.

It isn't as if a writer merely records life as it unfurls. Reality does not automatically transcribe as literature; real people are not shapely, compelling characters to be harvested. Charming facts and sharp observations rarely slide seamlessly into whatever narrative is at hand.

Any show I'm working on, I want the stories to always be about something, and to have the potential to be emotional. That's the kind of story that I like.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.

I don't know any writer of fiction who enjoys trying to point out or dissect whatever they produced with strangers and let them go through it and pick apart what's real and what isn't.

When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible.

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.