David Brock Quotes

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.

The conventional wisdom with David Mamet is, you do not change a word. And that agrees with me. If you want to change any of David's words, it's like wanting to change the iambic pentameter in Shakespeare - you should do something else.

Writing a novel is so hard, and there are so many problems that the last thing you're thinking about is adapting this mess you have on your hands as a movie. You just want to get it to work as a novel. That's your main focus.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

While writing a novel, I don't read anything new in fiction. I am too engrossed.

I think everything we do, on one level or another, as writers, most of our writing is informed by our world view.

You apply the skills you use to produce your own book to make an anthology. Shaping. Rhythm.

'Dreamsongs' allows me to show the scope of my writing - with personal commentary that puts the works in context and includes some autobiographical details intended to reveal how each piece came to be, what it represents, and how it has formed, or been informed by, my philosophy of writing.

Out of respect to writers, you have to read the book in the way in which the author visualised it going out into the world.

I think part of the problem sometimes is that there's so much happening in my books, to whittle it down into a single script is hard.

It was pretty much the way that it was when I first read it, although one exception would be that some ideas that I had were also incorporated into the script.

Interpreter of Maladies is the title of one of the stories in the book. And the phrase itself was something I thought of before I even wrote that story.

The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.

The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

In general, my own experience of writing an adaptation of 'Evening' gave me a chance to get into different parts of the book.

What does Sinclair know about anything? He's just a writer.

What's on the page dictates a lot of what I do. When the words are there, it's easy.

'An Education' was a complicated piece of work because it came from a tiny essay, so it took me a while to find the story I wanted to tell and the characters I wanted to tell it about. That really only emerged after four or five drafts.

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.

There's nothing sacred about the book you've written. The Bible says there's safety in a multitude of counselors. The movie is the movie, and the book is the book. They're different critters, and each must stand on their own merits.

Books like Munro's are so deeply personal and idiosyncratic that it feels like a violation to subject them to the crude business of committee meetings and PR releases; you might as well storm a butterfly den with a klieg light.

I'm not standing above the audience trying to manipulate them as a puppet master or a trickster; I'm inside the story I'm writing and making and thinking about things very seriously and feeling very deeply at times, and trying to translate that into a narrative.