Anne Tyler Quotes

The best thing about being a fiction writer is that where the truth is inconvenient, I could veer away.

Well,the fun part of being a writer is that it's like making a wonderful film, with no limit on my budget. I can design the sets, the costume, the lightings, I write the script, and then I get to perform all the roles as I step into each character's skin, zip up, and adopt that point of view. So, to me, they are all compelling and fascinating.

I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

The great thing about writing is, if you don't like the world, we'll create a different one.

I talk to myself on paper about my characters - sometimes writing in first person... I keep lists of unanswered questions that I can always turn to in order to get myself going.

Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.

One of the things when you write, well the way I write, is that you are writing your scenario and there are different roads that become available that the characters could go down. Screenwriters will have a habit of putting road blocks up against some of those roads because basically they can't afford to have their characters go down there because they think they are writing a movie or trying to sell a script or something like that. I have never put that kind of imposition on my characters. Wherever they go I follow.

It's a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to. Writing is very pleasurable, very seductive, and very therapeutic. Time passes very fast when I'm writing-really fast. I'm puzzling over something, and time just flies by. It's an exhilarating feeling. How bad can it be? It's sitting alone with fictional characters. You're escaping from the world in your own way and that's fine. Why not?

I was always fascinated by the fact that you could take paper and ink and create worlds, images, characters. It seemed like magic.

Writing grew out of the pleasure of escape. My novels are very much outside of my personal experience. That is why I love writing fiction. It allows me to leave my existence and inhabit other lives.

I write to be the characters that I am not.

My characters, I find them as I'm writing. It's quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

I find the characters in my head and the more I write about them, the better I get to know them.

In the writing phase, normally I try not to envisage any particular actors because I like to let the characters sort of reveal themselves in that process.

Writing novels is a way of living alternative lives.

What I try to do is write from the inside out. I really try to jump into the world of the film and the characters, try to imagine myself in that world rather than imagining it as a film I'm watching onscreen. Sometimes, that means I'm discovering things the way the audience will, with character and story.

Mainly, I try not to think about my readers as I write - I just think of my characters and myself - If they're interesting to me, my hope is that they'll be interesting to others as well.

There is a part of me that has to depend on fantasy, because if you can't be somewhat of a fantasy person, then you can't write

The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.

I don't think an actor needs to necessarily go through his things to do his job. I think it's way more important to imagine. And then, when you're imagining, your experiences, your images and your own personal things will show up, but you keep imagining. You don't get stuck in your own personal things, otherwise you are telling your story in every character, and that's not interesting for anybody.

Characters more or less present themselves to me. I don't know their origins. I think if I did, if I seemed to myself to fabricate them, I could not induce suspension of disbelief in myself in the way writing fiction requires.

Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

My husband says I have too much imagination, but I don't think a writer can have too much imagination!