Abi Morgan Quotes

You have to have empathy, knowledge and compassion for your characters if you're a writer.

When I write, I try to capture one of those pivotal moments. If I succeed, I have shifted the reader's view of the world, just a little. The character is not the only one to experience change. That is my job, shifting perceptions, one story at a time. The trouble is, I don't like writing. But I love having written.

I think that, for physicians who want to become writers, they have the material, the smarts, they have the logic, they know the stories; it's just a matter of being able to connect with their emotional sides - that's the key to writing good fiction.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

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.

The novelist in me is probably hiding behind all the stories I write, looking for ways to connect them and continue the conversation with readers. Maybe I'm writing one long narrative, and each book, however different from the last, is just a chapter.

Writing a novel is an intense and lonely business, but you have the reward at the end of a very direct dialogue between you and the reader.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

It's hard, because when you talk about process or your characters ruling your narrative, it sounds like you have no control, but obviously you're ultimately the author, so you do have control.

SOON was the first novel where I used a rough outline. Usually I have characters and an idea and write as a process of discovery. Like working without a net.

When I began to write seriously, 40 years ago now, my chosen form was the novel.

I just try to write the best story I can, a story I would love to read, and hope that readers feel the same.

I write characters and stories that move me, and I write from the heart.

'The Secret Life of Bees' was my first novel, so I had no process. I was flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, trying to understand how I, as a novelist, would work with story.

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.

The first book I sat down to write was an historical romance. It was really bad and thankfully no one ever saw it.

The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it's been described as a kind of dreamlike state where you're letting the novel make its own shape, and you're putting into it the pleasure of creation, which is intoxicating.

I don't know if anything I write will endure, but I do try to write it as a narrative that will not only challenge but also entice the reader into the lives of children.

When you've got good writing, you can kind of give up all the research, in a way, and start just following the emotional integrity of the journey of your character.

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

If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering.

I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.

When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.