Charles Palliser Quotes

Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.

I started thinking about the endings of novels not because I think endings are so important, but because I think they're actually not as important as they're sometimes given credit for.

I'm so tired of stories starting, 'Maud Jones was walking her dog down Broadway.' You've got to go over to the back page somewhere to finally find out the damn dog was run over by a truck. Get the thing told, for heaven's sake. Everybody doesn't have to be an O. Henry.

With novels, you're representing things. You're not explaining.

I purposely adopted a style in my storytelling wherein I don't have to explain everything or why the story is moving in a particular way.

Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.

I don't like characters that are left being jerks at the end of the movie.

A novel wouldn't be a book if there weren't some flights of fancy on the part of the author, stopping time to examine things, or to tell a joke.

I have heard of novels started in the middle, at the end, written in patches to be joined together later, but I have never felt the slightest desire to do this.

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

The challenge is always to find the good place to end the book. The rule I follow with myself is that every book should end where the next book would logically begin. I know that some readers wish that literally all of the threads would be neatly tied off and snipped, but life just doesn't work that way.

A novel means a new way of doing a story. If you go back the origins of a novel, 'Clarissa' - that's not a novel; it's just a bunch of letters. But it isn't! Because it's organised in a particular way! A novel is what you make of it.

It's important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he's writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering.

Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.

The portal structure is simply a technique: it is neither necessary nor unnecessary, except as the writer and the story make it so. In the case of 'The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant,' it was absolutely necessary to my intentions.

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels.

Expressing political opinion can be a powerful way to establish a character's voice when writing fiction.

Tricker the Squirrel is the best piece I ever wrote. It's intricate.

A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.

I think stories do have an ending. I think they need to have an ending eventually because that is a story: a beginning, middle and end. If you draw out the end too long, I think storytelling can get tired.

I don't have a great eye for detail. I leave blanks in all of my stories. I leave out all detail, which leaves the reader to fill in something better.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

The last paragraph, in which you tell what the story is about, is almost always best left out.

I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.