Joe Shuster Quotes

Normally, I name my characters after famous comedians.

For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.

A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.

I think every writer has a book that haunts them, and on some level, every book you write is a reaction to it. 'Lolita' is that book for me. Nabokov's love of wordplay, descriptive detail, artfully complex plots, and his themes of obsession and lost love, are inspiring.

I thought I would keep the first name Susan and change the last name but I picked up this book and as I opened it the lead character in it was called Morgan Brittany.

I like naming characters.

When a character bears the same name as the author it's just an invitation to have some fun.

I like straightforward names for my characters. When I get too symbolic with names or places, I start feeling like the characters and the story are less read, and I lose interest.

At one point it occurred to me that the title could make a more significant contribution to the storytelling process. It could act as a prologue.

A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.

I guess I have a weird habit of writing body part metaphors.

I'm good at - or, rather, I like - giving names to characters.

Short stories and poems are an intense burst of emotions.

I don't understand why people are going mad about the lyrics I write? Do they expect everyone to become Mirza Ghalib?

The novel is a seduction; a reader has to be seduced.

My own journey as a writer has been the discovery of different theatrical voices. Chekhov was a revelation. Tennessee Williams was another one. We read 'The Glass Menagerie' in high school, and I still remember the cover.

At writing workshops, they taught us to show, not tell - well, showing takes time.

I think the benefit of being a writer is that I'm looking for the subtext on the page, because all good writing has subtext. And as a writer, you look at the big scope of things, the big story, rather than just your individual story line, because I think it's important to know what you're in and how you fit into it.

I think there are people who are born storytellers. I think of someone like T. C. Boyle or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I think really, without putting any pejorative on it, they're like carnival barkers, 'Come into the tent, and I'll tell you this story.'

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It's a story.

I've been writing long enough to know that fiction, as a rhetorical mode, works very differently from expository writing. If an author has a specific critique about contemporary society in mind, fiction tends not to be the best means to deliver that critique.

When we talk about novels, we don't often talk about imagination. Why not? Does it seem too first grade? In reviews, you read about limpid prose, about the faithful reproduction of consciousness, about moral heft, but rarely about the power of pure, unadulterated imagination.

I like to describe my characters as though they were all trapped in a glass box.

Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms.

No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things