Nalo Hopkinson Quotes

It is an author's primary duty to entertain. Sling out all the philosophical terms, but keep the reader turning the page.

People just want good stories.

Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.

The greatest sin for a writer is to be boring.

I enjoy both TV writing and novel writing, and they are very similar. The goal is to entertain and amuse the audience, and I subscribe to this P.G. Wodehouse piece of advice: "Try to give pleasure with every sentence."

What I always try to do in all my books is to make the stories such that if you don't agree with me politically or you're not interested in the thematics, the story will still keep you turning the pages.

Good stories flow like honey but bad stories stick in the craw [gullet]. What is a bad story? It's a story that cannot be absorbed in the first time of reading. It's a story that leaves questions unanswered.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

Writers who can't invent stories often substitute style for narrative. They remind me of the painter who couldn't paint people, so he painted chairs.

One of the ways in which writers most show their inventiveness is in the things they tell us about how they write. Generally speaking, I don't like to make a plan before I've written a story. I find it kills the story - deadens it, makes it uninteresting. Unless I'm surprised by something in a story, the reader's not going to be surprised either.

The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.

I'm still getting to the good part / the breaking down / learning how to write my story.

Good storytelling is harder than it sounds, but the easy part is that everyone has the ability to do it. ...Tap into it.

[The way Stanley Kubrick] tells a story is antithetical to the way we are accustomed to receiving stories.

I need fiction like you need to eat or exercise.

I've always liked working on stories that combine people who are relatable with something insane.

A page of Addison or of Irving will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of Poe's will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook.

The story is a piece of work. The novel is a way of life.

I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.

When you tell a story in the kitchen to a friend, it's full of mistakes and repetitions. It's good to avoid that in literature, but still, a story should feel like a conversation. It's not a lecture.

I grew up with some kind of storytelling instinct, and when I write, my default setting is to find a story and then to tell it. It's the only way I know how to write.

Because anybody can write, but not everybody invents new forms of writing. Gertrude Stein invented a new form of writing and her imitators are just "talents."

Good marketers tell a story.

Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.

I think the way you become a good storyteller is to read a lot of stories and evaluate them in your own mind.