Andrew Greeley Quotes

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

Often what happens with the writing is that you know where you want to start and you know where you want to end, but the journey is never quite what you predict because the characters take on a life on their own.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

I'm a novelist. I'm not a crusader, and I'm not an editorial writer. And I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.

I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.

I enjoy the writing process and producing; I enjoy seeing an idea come to fruition. I'm driven by very complex characters. You look at the pilot of 'Breaking Bad,' where there's so much depth to the character, you can't help but be invested when you watch.

For me as a writer, the story has always taken precedence over everything else. I have never sat down to write with broad, sweeping ideas in mind, and certainly never with a specific agenda.

If you set out to write an adjective novel, you're setting out to write a mediocre novel; your allegiance is to the adjective, not to the story, and then that just sucks all the joy right out of it.

When you're writing a novel - at least the way I write is I work from what I would call 'emotional atmosphere,' ambiance to ambiance.

When I sit down to write, I know everything I need to know... I start writing, and within 30 seconds or 60 seconds, I'm watching a movie. I'm not making this stuff up; the characters are acting it out, and I'm just writing it down.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

It can certainly happen that characters in more sophisticated stories can 'take over' as they develop and change the author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times.

I tend to write one character at a time. But I don't write the entirety of one character at a time.

I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they're going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don't obey the rules of progression for novels. I don't think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let's say a chunk of fiction.

As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.

Since I don't outline my books very much, I feel like sometimes I don't have a choice in what the characters do; they just kind of take over sometimes.

When I sit down to write a scene, I have a plan in mind, and I'm thrilled when a character disregards my goals and takes the story to a place I hadn't imagined.

I love all the characters I write.

I always have a rough outline, but I'm shocked at how little I actually follow it. Those characters keep doing things that I never expected. I think if I crept up to my keyboard and peeked, they'd be talking about things behind my back. Okay, that's a little paranoid and delusional... but just a little.