Oscar Hijuelos Quotes

And I identify too closely with my reading, with my writing.

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

I can't imagine writing a screenplay where I didn't feel deeply connected at some kind of visceral level to the material.

I'm always careful about the thing I'm writing to make sure a viewer can imagine it happening to themselves.

I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think— no, you will realize— that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.

I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing.

This is what I love about novels - both reading them and writing them. They jump into the abyss to be with you where you are.

I have to feel something emotionally on the story to be able to write for it. I turn things down if I don't feel I'm really right to tell that particular story.

Man, that's the only kind of book I like – one that's so real you want to find out everything there is to know about the person who wrote it, like how tall he is and what kind of music he likes and whether or not he really went through all the stuff he was writing about.

My emotional investment started when I read the first scene of the actual drama [45 Years]. I can't explain it, there's no logic to it, but the notion of one's youth that somehow comes back but is gone, a man of my age connecting to that timing of life.

I feel very much a part of what I'm writing about, and I'm writing about things that concern me on a daily basis. I'm not really interested in writing musical diaries, if you know what I mean.

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

I think what I love most [about writing] is that feeling that you really nailed something. Sometimes with a line you feel that it really captured what it is that you had inside you and you got it out for a stranger to read, someone who may never love you or meet you, but he or she is going to get that experience from that line.

I think that in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion.

Writing fiction, like reading fiction, is a practice in empathy.

It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories.

Often you must turn your stylus to erase, if you hope to write anything worth a second reading.

Anything that happens after I write a song...that's fine with me. It's up to the listener to read into it what they need from it. And that's part of the reason I write like I do, so I can leave the holes in the right places so people can say, 'Yeah, that happened to me,' and they're able to have their own little fantasy about it.

The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.

The only thing that works with writing is that you care so passionately about it yourself, that you make someone else care passionately about it.

Write to the mind and heart, and let the ear Glean after what it can.

People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. What I'm desperately trying to do is to get students to talk to themselves as though they are indeed themselves, and not someone else.

On a more technical level, a story takes a lot of words. And to generate words and phrases and images and so on, that will compel the reader to continue reading - that stand a chance of really grabbing a reader - the writer has to work out of a place of, let's say, familiarity and affection. The matrix of the story has to be made out of stuff the writer really knows about and likes. The writer can't be stretching and (purely) inventing all the time. Well, I can't, anyway.

I've never written for anybody else. For me, it was a challenge. I write for me. I don't write for anybody else. And what was good about it was that I was writing for somebody I knew. I knew what my mother thinks and how she feels. So it was finding that creative spirit to write about my mother.