Stephen McCauley Quotes

My preferred style is to write in first person, so I always have to play around with possible narrator voices until I find something that works.

Certain subjects may no longer be taboo in cinema. But there are ways to treat them that still create shock.

Well, in features, and in writing especially, it's often the style of the writer comes in.

Starz is a network that's going for the content that's extremely honest and pushing the envelope and is provocative.

You must find the right voice (or voices) for the timbre that can convince a reader to give himself up to you.

In my writing I wanted to be liked for writing really unlikeable stuff. There were books that people, particularly women, hated so much. They said, "I threw it against the wall!" Which, in my opinion, was a compliment. Because it's very hard to get somebody to throw something.

Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique.

And the stuff that I write, is even tougher than dykes.

One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.

I want women writers to write boldly, wildly, deeply. I want them to feel really liberated to tell the brutal truth, however they see that truth and are moved to tell it.

Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution - such call I good books.

Certain writers have it very precise and there's not much room to add something.

Unfortunately, the problem of the free speech argument is that you have to defend people you can't stand.

You develop a style from writing a lot.

The thought of filming in London was a big draw because I could stay in my house. I read it, and I was really taken with it because it felt at once very unapologetic for what it was, which is a romantic comedy. But at the same time, a little spiky and a little truthful.

I write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much ... But when I write, I write weird. That's very strange. When I'm getting more and more serious, I'm getting more and more weird.

Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition.

There are wonderful things having to do with women's health. But not when it comes to abortion.

Authors have to write for their characters, for who they are, that's the strength of books. Don't worry about censors. Just write the story you need to tell and the rewards will come.

I have a philosophy that everything you write doesn't have to be good for everybody. There are going to be people that get irritated by some of the things I write-including my parents. And then there are going to be people that you draw in because of the pointedness of certain things.

Expect a most agreeable letter; for not being overburdened with subject (having nothing at all to say) I shall have no check to my Genius from beginning to end.

The great writer finds style as the mystic finds God, in his own soul.

Good writing never soothes or comforts. It is no prescription, neither is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the reader's face.

Most of the things that are supposed to be so objectionable in books are things that every teenager, in the United States, not only knows, but has talked about at length in school, or on the way home from school.

Not getting bored of my own story and/or character is one of the main struggles I have had with novel writing, and I have put to bed big chunks of work that just didn't sustain my interest.