Hal David Quotes

The older I get, the more I seek to use a plain prose style, concentrating more on story.

I try to be as clear and simple as I can be in my illustrations so that the child can tell what is going on and what the emotions are.

I have no particular reader in mind, but a passionate desire to tell an honest, moving story.

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'm open to reading almost anything - fiction, nonfiction - as long as I know from the first sentence or two that this is a voice I want to listen to for a good long while. It has much to do with imagery and language, a particular perspective, the assured knowledge of the particular universe the writer has created.

Readers want a story, not a pattern. It's the specifics of a story that make it really ping our various reader radars.

I think it's such a challenge to tell a story, and I think, to be honest, the shorter, the clearer, the better.

Storytelling is powerful; film particularly. We can know a lot of things intellectually, but humans really live on storytelling. Primarily with ourselves; we're all stories of our own narrative.

I prefer the plain and simple sentences: the ones that you don't notice because you're so interested in what's happening to the people and events that the sentences are creating.

In my writing, I try to combine all my favorite elements of journalism - accuracy, real characters that exist on this planet - with all my favorite elements of literature: a sense of flow, of propulsion, of wanting to read every sentence.

You know, we didn't want to kill anyone, but we knew that "Star Wars" is a generational tale. It always is. And for it to have some guts and some resonance and true stakes, I don't think that everyone could have come through the story unscathed.

You'll lose your reader if you are vague, not clear, and not present. We love details, personal connections, stories.

My stories are very compact. I want them to say the most complex things in the simplest way.

I think storytelling is a thing of beauty, and also very difficult. It's a craft you have to continue to work at.

I think the most important thing when you're telling a story is to just tell the story as best as you possibly can.

A good novel should be deeply unsettling - its satisfactions should come from its authenticity and its formal coherence. We must feel something crucial is at stake.

These days, I like to think of sentences as workers. Only one of their jobs is to look and sound good. Sentences are the carriers of plot. They're the conjurers of images, the conveyors of tone and meaning and voice. The best sentences surprise us.

That's what writing is all about, after all, making others see what you have put down on the page and believing that it does, or could, exist and you want to go there.

I think little things are more powerful because they're more honest, so people feel them more strongly.

It's the only way I really know how to tell the story is to be able to kind of live through the characters. So when I find something that resonates with me, it's usually because it cuts to something very real inside of me; something that I've gone through or experienced.

I'm writing about real things. Real people. Real characters. You have to believe what I write about is true or you wouldn't pay any attention at all. Sometimes it's me, or a composite of me and other people. Sometimes it's not me at all.

Ideas come from all over, but as I write more and more, I find I'm always hunting for mood: I want to write a novel with a pervasive mood that sticks with you after you close the cover.

Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.

Drama is drama, and it's really... if it's something small, you put a magnifying glass up to it; if it's something big, you use a wide lens.

I don't try to call myself a poet. But I know that my stuff is pretty literal, in that the themes are pretty simple and on the surface.