E. M. Forster Quotes

The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.

You can't write a novel all at once, any more than you can swallow a whale in one gulp. You do have to break it up into smaller chunks. But those smaller chunks aren't good old familiar short stories. Novels aren't built out of short stories. They are built out of scenes.

Ordinary facts are arranged within time, strung along its length as on a thread. There they have their antecedents and their consequences, which crowd tightly together and press hard one upon the other without any pause. This has its importance for any narrative, of which continuity and successiveness are the soul.

What interests me about fiction is plot. And what interests me about plot is whether someone tells a story that moves me within the constraints of storytelling. And I have narrowly defined storytelling.

Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.

A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.

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.

Stories are like a river that flows - you dip a bucket in it

All good novelists have bad memories.

Sometimes, if I had until the next day to turn the story in, I'd head home, finding that the knot in the narrative came loose with the rhythmic clacking of the subway train.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

Stories worked much the same way . . . A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.

It's impossible for me, without getting a big wide shot of Manhattan, to convince people that it's another day. But if we go to a commercial and we come up and people are in different clothes, you know it's another day.

I have a very acute sense of place and time, so all of my stories are rooted in a place and a time.

It's a funny thing about stories. It doesn't feel like you make them up, more like you find them. You type and type and you know you haven't got it yet, because somewhere out there, there's that perfect thing -- the unexpected ending that was always going to happen. That place you've always been heading for, but never expected to go.

Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.

Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.

Pace is crucial. Fine writing isn't enough. Writing students can be great at producing a single page of well-crafted prose; what they sometimes lack is the ability to take the reader on a journey, with all the changes of terrain, speed and mood that a long journey involves. Again, I find that looking at films can help. Most novels will want to move close, linger, move back, move on, in pretty cinematic ways.

I love the ordered mind of history because it takes us out of the chaos, momentarily, and says, "Ah, so this is the story we are engaged in."

I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.

The true novelist is one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story.

There are things the story must have or else look incomplete. And these will almost automatically present themselves. When they don't, you are in trouble and then the novel stops.

I usually start writing stories from tone and not from content - kind of like people who create music and invent the lyrics later on.

The bad novelist constructs his characters; he directs them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them act; he hears their voices even before he knows them.

Humans know when it's not a good story. Unless you do this for a living, you may not know exactly why you don't like a story, but you can't fool an audience ever. They know when you have it and they know when you don't.