Caroline Leavitt Quotes

I think there's a growing courage among the younger generation of American writers. Because of the more superficial treatment of characters taking place in cinema, they have had to deal with that by digging deeper into who these people are.

I tell stories. I kind of stumbled on that by trying to combine Jane Austen and magic.

I love writing picture books and story books because of the exciting, visual life that artists and illustrators give to them. And most of all, I love writing novels because of the inner, emotional journeys that they take me on. Hopefully, the reader comes with me!

The idea behind a dish - the delight and the surprise - makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn't just 'Here's the facts - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.' It's how you tell it.

Good fiction can both entertain and light up those dark corners where nice people don't want to go.

It seems to me that you would have to write a novel on a very small, intimate scale for it not to become political.

A good novel is something that challenges perception, that allows you to see the world anew through a different point of view - something that genre fiction doesn't do, although it sells more because it doesn't disturb people's innate sense of what a novel should be about. Often, people want characters to be nice, for example.

A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.

You can be moved by an animated film and not by a live action film. There could be great inspiration in and humanity in that animated story.

I didn't want readers to have to make allowances for what they couldn't see, but to be able to say to themselves that the fabric of the magic detailed was perfectly believable.

As a writer, I absorb stories, allow them to churn within my own head and heart - often for years - until I find a way of telling them that fits both my time and temperament.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I'm 100 percent fiction writer... I don't want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don't state my political messages to anybody.

Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.

I would like to write a book that wasn't so violent and weird, but I just don't think I can do that with my talent. I don't think it would come off.

A good novel doesn't just transcend the boundaries of its target market - it knows nothing about target markets.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

Stephen King has inspired me with his humor and honesty, and his admonition that the author's job is to tell the truth.

All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

Every once in a while I feel the tremendous force of the novel. But it does not stay with me.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.

My instinct is to absolutely recoil when talking about writing in a mechanistic way. Nothing could be dumber than writing a film or TV script based on prescriptions, on other peoples' ideas of what character should be.