Sue Grafton Quotes

Any time a writer thinks he has all the answers to how someone should talk or react or end a scene, it's a spontaneity-killer.

I do write a lot of prose. It's not disciplined enough yet that it's actually become stories, or short stories. The idea of writing a novel seems impossible.

When I get to a point in my book writing when I don't know what I'm going to do next, I'll come back look at underlined passages and see if the images I wrote still have a certain amount of resonance for me.

When I first started out, I was trying to write stories about nurses and lawyers and a lot of people I didn't know anything about, and they just weren't working.

I hear people talk in my head and I write it down. I choose where they live and how they dress to be real. That person wouldn't wear that. That person wouldn't say that. She can't afford to live like that. All that bullshit that so many movies have in them. I don't want to see that.

I don't know how to write without thinking what people would want. You don't know whether they want you to be black or white, so you kind of get a gray, something in the middle.

One of the challenges in writing the script Call Me by Your Name was that I had to find something concrete for the professor to do. In the book he is some kind of classics scholar. But I thought it would be interesting to make him into something of an art historian and archaeologist whose background was the classical world. It's always difficult when someone is supposed to be an intellectual. What do they do? You can't just film them sitting around and thinking all day. And that's what the business of the statues is all about.

I don't write the same book over and over - I think if I did that, I would stop writing. I couldn't write a series with the same character, and I couldn't write a romance novel over and over again that takes place at a different beach every year. That's not who I am.

Everybody can write a beginning and an ending, but to actually define that middle point where everything will go from professional to person, where everything will change, is always the hardest part, because it can very easily be too constructed, too artificial.

I was told many times that my writing was either too Korean - or not Korean enough.

Most of us start from that position of irony now and what I wanted to do - really felt like I had to do if I was going to write another novel - was move towards something like sincerity.

That famous writer’s block is a myth as far as I’m concerned. I think bad writers must have a great difficulty writing. They don’t want to do it. They have become writers out of reasons of ambition. It must be a great strain to them to make marks on a page when they really have nothing much to say, and don’t enjoy doing it. I’m not so sure what I have to say but I certainly enjoy making sentences.

Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.

I know that if I have been working on one paragraph and I have written it three times, it goes in the bin. Unless it comes straight out, it is wrong, it is awkward, it does not fit.

If you become very self-conscious about what you are doing, you kill. You kill the character. Then it doesn't work. You have to come from a sincere place. And you don't think too much. I don't go to the hotel and I start thinking what am I going to say tomorrow and start writing things down.

I don't have a style. I wouldn't say I have a style as a writer, either. I know people have said "This is what he does," but when I'm writing, I don't think about that. I don't think about a style.

Your characters get angry at you if you speak about them and stop you from giving birth to them on the page in revenge. Real writers sit down and write. Wannabe writers sit around and talk.

You can't write if you can't relate.

I thought, if I write a book that is not a retelling of Pride and Prejudice, it's not going to mean that I will not get any criticism. I might as well write the book that I want to write.

I like the idea that Ernest Hemingway always wrote about certain things he knew, he knew the ins and outs, back to fronts of what he was talking about. I love that as an inspiration for myself, to keep it true to what you know. I'm always writing little lines and saving them for later.

I sat down and tried to write a story. "Ian MacArthur is a wonderful sweet fellow who wears glasses and peers out of them with delight." That was the first sentence. The problem was that I just couldn't think of the next one. After cleaning my room three times, I decided to leave Ian alone for a while because I was starting to get mad at him.

Once I start work on a project, I don’t stop and I don’t slow down unless I absolutely have to. If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind – they begin to seem like characters instead of real people. The tale’s narrative cutting edge starts to rust and I begin to lose my hold on the story’s plot and pace. Worst of all, the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade. The work starts to feel like work, and for most writers that is the smooch of death.

Many writers write across difference of one kind or another. Sometimes the difference is large and recognizable: gender, or race, or religion, or sexuality. And sometimes the differences are smaller. ... Where authors get into trouble is in trying to make those different characters stand in for whole groups of people, or for creating characters only to fetishize or explore their supposed otherness. Your character can be wildly different from you, as long as he's written with respect and, moreover, specificity.

I lack the skill to hold a story line for the length required for a novel or even a short story. I have never had an idea that could withstand a hundred thousand words, or even ten thousand words of rubber meeting the road.

Most writers write books that they wouldn't read. I ought to know; I've done it myself.