Susan Straight Quotes

I think that novels are tools of thought. They are moral philosophy with the theory left out, with just the examples of the moral situations left standing.

I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy.

Linda Svendsen's 'Marine Life' was important. I was nearly 22. Larry Mathews discussed the book in a creative writing class. We examined her stories, figured out how they worked.

That's the novelist's job: to peel back the layers and look underneath.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

Read good books. Read bad books - and figure out why you don't like them. Then don't do it when you write. If you are a science fiction or fantasy writer, going to conventions and attending panels is very useful.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

I'm writing exactly the kinds of books I like to write. And they're the kinds of books I like to read. They're popular commercial fiction. That's what they are.

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

There's so much more to a book than just the reading.

One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

I am trying to write novels for properly clever people, but I also want them to be proper novels that also stick in a person's mind and have an atmosphere about them.

Each of my books is different. Deliberately... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.

I think many people would say that writers like Stephen King have hypergraphia.

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.

I want to be inside Nic Pizzolatto's brain.

A novel's whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is finding the theme.

An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.

For me, when I read a book, I'm very much about detail.

I know how to write fiction well.

Every thought and word that a novelist thinks or writes is part of that castle constructed from sands on the beach of Me, including the turret or rampart or moat he may have thought or written on behalf of someone or something else.

When I write fiction, I never try to deliver a message; I just want to tell a story. But I admit that I want the story to be memorable and the characters to touch the reader's heart.