Padgett Powell Quotes

William Trevor is an author I admire; his stories are subtle and powerful, and beautifully written.

Anything I've ever read by John Irving has been really well written.

I'm rereading Jenny Offill's 'Dept. of Speculation.' I love it, and she's just a magician. Line by line and paragraph by paragraph, it's mesmerizing and so intricately plotted and so nimble.

There are things I read doing research, and there are certain books and writers I just love to read. There are books of Brian Morten's that I love, for instance. There's a wonderful book by an Australian writer named Helen Garner called 'The Children's Bach,' and I just love the way she uses language in it.

Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.

I love contemporary North American fiction and short fiction. My favorite writer is Jonathan Franzen, and my favorite writers of short fiction are George Saunders and Alice Munro.

My favourite book - 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford, which I have read about 20 times - is different from my favourite author, who is Iris Murdoch. I find her books exciting and unputdownable. Her characters are so carefully studied and in-depth; I love that.

I love intricate plotting and exciting twists, but I realize more that people enjoy a good story in a simple, focused way.

So long as you tell a story that falls within the fairly generous boundaries of the suspense novel, you're free to make the novel as good as you can. You're allowed to challenge the reader. You can experiment with voice and style.

The thing about the 'Melrose' novels is that I have to feel they're impossible when I set out.

I stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.

It's not a terribly original thing to say, but I love Raymond Carver. For one thing, he's fun to read out loud.

Master storytellers like Jeffrey Archer and Arthur Hailey use simple language. But they manage to grab the attention of the readers right from page one. I'll consider myself a good storyteller the day people believe it's OK to be late for work or postpone deadlines just to finish reading my book.

'At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom' by Amy Hempel showed me the lean quality of prose.

I love John Irving's stuff. It's that marriage of comedy and tragedy. It's really terrific.

To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.

I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.

A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.

For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot.

Octavia Butler was more interested in writing a good story than in worrying about where to slot it.

I think you can get a sort of intensity and an edginess offering nine stories in a book. Competing versions of things.

All good, clean stories are melodrama; it's just the set of devices that determines how you show or hide it.

I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer, I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me.

I studied the short story as part of my creative writing course at university but then set off as a novelist. Generally, there is a sense that even if you want to write short stories, you need to do a novel first.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.