Lawrence O'Donnell Quotes

When I'm sitting writing, I know that something works if I've made myself cry, or laugh, or have a visceral emotion.

It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.

If there is any secret to my success, I think it's that my characters are very real to me. I feel everything they feel, and therefore I think my readers care about them.

If I don't cry while writing a key emotional scene, my gut feeling is it's failed.

I go to great lengths to make certain situations feel right to the reader.

I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.

I don't think you can cry if the script is rubbish. I have to feel it; it's as simple as that. It's just like if you're watching something moving, and you feel yourself welling up. It's the same thing. You're just being carried along with the story. There's nothing magical about it. I think I'm in touch with my emotions, and I can't help it.

The stories I love the most are where the author has a lot of empathy for everyone. The author loves their characters and takes their situations really seriously, and you feel like you're just dropped into a different world.

I think it's very easy to disgust the reader with violence on the page - that's incredibly easy - but it's far harder to make a reader care about a character.

Whatever the readers feel when they're reading my books, I feel it tenfold when I'm writing it.

Any show I'm working on, I want the stories to always be about something, and to have the potential to be emotional. That's the kind of story that I like.

The thing is, emotion - if it's visibly felt by the writer - will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still hit the reader right in the gut. But you have to really mean it.

Fans always say they laughed and they cried while reading my books. And I tell them that I laughed and cried while writing them.

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.

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 think that with any emotion - fear, love, nervousness - if the actor's feeling it, then the audience feels it.

Since I am first of all a character writer, that character's emotions are as vivid to me as my own. I always begin with an emotion after I have established a character in my mind. I feel what they feel. I guess that is why it comes across so strongly.

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 write fiction, you can sort of invent more but also pack it with emotions that are very pertinent to you. Whereas with nonfiction, you have to be as factual as possible but also hopefully - also bring... emotional relevance to the piece.

When I do my best work, the stories tend to be pretty emotionally-charged.

I want to earn a reader's capacity to be moved.

We could make the most beautiful film in the world, but if it doesn't have a heart beating underneath it, then no one's going to be interested.

I think that, as a writer, while it's your job to construct stories, you have to navigate your way through them with your heart.

We all know to feel sympathy for those who've suffered from drug addiction, child abuse, and terminal illness, so the set up elicits an emotional response that the story itself very well may not earn. Energy generated by the fiction itself is likely to produce more light.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.