Max Richter Quotes

I always think I know the way a novel will go. I write maps on oversized art pads like the kind I carried around in college when I was earnest about drawing. I need to have some idea of the shape of the novel, where its headed, so that I can proceed with confidence. But the truth is my characters start doing and saying things I don't expect.

Choosing to write a play is some kind of surrender. I don't make an outline. I sit and work, and suddenly the door opens, and out it comes.

My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark; it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.

When I wrote my first novel - I was nineteen - I did it very quickly. If you write fast, you feel like you're entering something not yet familiar - a world rather than thoughts about the world.

Writing a novel isn't like building a brick wall. You don't figure out how to do it, and then it gets easier each time because you know what you're doing. With writing a novel, you have to figure it out each time. Each time you start over, you just have the language and the idea and the hope.

When I sit down to make music, I try to enter a flow; I always open a blank session and just make something that I feel like making.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

I like to sit down every day and not know where the book is going. I have no idea where the book is going to go or how it's going to end as I'm writing it.

I write when I have to; I write when the song is done and I deal with the idea and I just go with it and I'll become what that song is all about until I have finished it. And when you do that, it makes the song more visual, it makes it more personal.

I always say that, for me, writing a book is like a wacky Greyhound bus trip - I know where I'm starting and where I'll end up, but I have no idea what will happen along the way.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

SOON was the first novel where I used a rough outline. Usually I have characters and an idea and write as a process of discovery. Like working without a net.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

What surprised me most while writing 'The Monogram Murders' was that everything I needed seemed to arrive in my head exactly when I needed it.

It's been a while since I've written a novel aimed at the adult market, but I never sit down and say to myself, 'Okay, now I'm going to write something for us old folks.' I get gripped by an idea, and I go where the idea takes me.

It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

I just let the character speak to me and things appear.

As I got farther and farther along in the series I did less and less preparation. I didn't use outlines or sketches. I just had a vague idea of what I wanted to tell and then the dialogue just came to me as I was inking the page.

The songs sort of come out spontaneously and it'll take me awhile to figure out what exactly is happening lyrically, what kind of story I'm telling. Then I start building little bridges - word bridges - to make everything go from one point to the next point to the next point until it reaches the end.