Laura Esquivel Quotes

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.

All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

Fiction, at its best, is a radical act of intimacy. It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked.

When I give myself over to a good novel, I surrender to the truths fashioned from one writer's heart, mind and soul. I do not waste a nanosecond wondering whether what I'm reading 'really happened.'

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

I'm writing about real things. Real people. Real characters. You have to believe what I write about is true or you wouldn't pay any attention at all. Sometimes it's me, or a composite of me and other people. Sometimes it's not me at all.

There is something in human beings that loves stories.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

Fiction will always be my greatest love, with poetry close behind.

When I am writing a story it feels as real as the life I am experiencing off the page. It's an emotional illusion, I guess.

I'm a child of the literary bent. I don't want to see 140 characters. I want to see a story.

A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

No matter how close to personal experience a story might be, inevitably you are going to get to a part that isn't yours and, actually, whether it happened or not becomes irrelevant. It is all about choosing the right words.

I tell stories. That's what I do. I've always told stories.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

Fiction basically is a form of gossip where you want to enter other people's lives, the lives of people you don't know, and you want to know what's going to happen to them.

I'm completely indifferent to what genre I read provided that I feel sympathy with how a writer perceives being alive in the world.

Fiction is all about vicarious experiences and getting into other people's heads in a way that no other art form lets you.

They say truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, but there's such a thing as believability when you're writing a novel.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

This is the beauty of fiction. We may not like these characters, but we inhabit them.

We're moved by emotions and characters and stories. We love that.

As human beings, it's good to build stories.

Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.