Penelope Fitzgerald Quotes

Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.

All my novels are very much directly related to my inner life, even though I'm inventing characters, even though it's fiction, even though it's make-believe, it nevertheless is coming out of the deepest recesses of myself.

Sometimes I think to get to the emotional level of a scene, you don't necessarily have to have experienced the exact thing that person has experienced, but whatever you have in your life that has gotten you to that place is usually enough.

For me, when I start a novel, I only have a general sense of what I am going to do - usually three or four big scenes or something to which I can really respond emotionally.

To read a character I'm not sympathizing with is generally quite a good, attractive proposition because I've got somewhere to go, I've got work to do, to try to understand why they behave like they behave, to relate entirely and understand them and to be completely emotionally connected. That is much more fun 99 percent of the time.

I've discovered I can't make a film about people I dislike.

I had to see and feel and be with the thing that I wanted to write about.

I think in some ways, acting and writing are the same. You're getting inside the skin of someone else; you're creating their language and their actions. As a writer, you have to see the whole picture and the structure, and you have to understand every character.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

My characters are always utterly sympathetic to me, if that makes any sense.

I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross: that it's to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish.

I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.

Sometimes when a character in a novel is difficult for me to enter, I sue something in myself or in my own life as a doorway into that character's mind and emotions.

I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn.

Write to the mind and heart, and let the ear Glean after what it can.

I believe that everybody needs to tell their story - to be heard, to be seen, to be acknowledged, to be understood. We all want that, deep down inside - and writing a book is a great way to make sense of your own experience and to share it with others.

When you write a character and their dialogue, you can't help imagining how you would be acting if you were them. You kind of have to relate to all of them. It's the most personal thing I've ever done.

This is what I love about novels - both reading them and writing them. They jump into the abyss to be with you where you are.

I have to feel something emotionally on the story to be able to write for it. I turn things down if I don't feel I'm really right to tell that particular story.

... it is nearly impossible to understand those who are beyond our sight, who are not explained to us by ties of birth or the contact of the flesh.

That's the wonderful thing about drama and writing and fiction: it's this wonderful shared experience that we all have. We can see into each other's lives.

The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it's about and why you're doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising ("but of course that's why he was doing that, and that means that...") and it's magic and wonderful and strange.

I can't believe when you write something from within, how many people relate to it.

As human beings, why does it take somebody to feel like they're close to us for us to see their humanity? Why can't we see the humanity in people that are distant from us?

The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are purely imaginary.