Carol Windley Quotes

Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.

I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer, I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me.

I have always loved short stories. I have been at least as influenced by the short story masters as I have been by novelists.

I think there are people who are born storytellers. I think of someone like T. C. Boyle or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I think really, without putting any pejorative on it, they're like carnival barkers, 'Come into the tent, and I'll tell you this story.'

Early influences included Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Charles Baxter, Richard Ford, Alice Munro, Denis Johnson - writers who are important to me still and who I discovered through my teachers.

I write short stories. I write every day.

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

I am also working on a couple of short stories for anthologies. This is new to me and I'm enjoying it.

I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.

'At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom' by Amy Hempel showed me the lean quality of prose.

When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.

I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.

I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They're very different, and I can't do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I'll learn something from them.

I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.

I don't read much nonfiction because the nonfiction I do read always seems to be so badly written. What I enjoy about fiction - the great gift of fiction - is that it gives language an opportunity to happen.

If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms.

The novelist, he's not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He's someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.

I don't know if it's good or bad, but when I first started writing I imitated the narrative thrust of a movie. And as I worked, I learned what you can do in fiction that you can't do in movies, and vice-versa.

I read many wonderful novels, though I now find the idea of literary fiction obsolete.

I'm not working on the Great American Novel. All I am doing, I hope, is entertaining readers.

I've gained a lot from James Joyce, Tolstoy, Chekhov and R. K. Narayan. While writing, I try to see if the story is going to radiate spokes. Their literature has always done that and gifted me beautiful things.

I really like the short stories that Melissa Bank writes. I think she's sort of channeling the female version of J.D. Salinger in more recent days.

Eventually, I just want to write wavy little short stories.

The novel is a seduction; a reader has to be seduced.