John Crowley Quotes

My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow.

Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.

I started thinking about the endings of novels not because I think endings are so important, but because I think they're actually not as important as they're sometimes given credit for.

To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

With any story I write, I could actually write it from three or four different perspectives, which would end with a completely different moral at the end.

A novel means a new way of doing a story. If you go back the origins of a novel, 'Clarissa' - that's not a novel; it's just a bunch of letters. But it isn't! Because it's organised in a particular way! A novel is what you make of it.

It can certainly happen that characters in more sophisticated stories can 'take over' as they develop and change the author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times.

We have that illusion that we are 'deciding' what to make a character do, in order to 'convey our message' or something like that. But, at least in my experience, you are often more like a river-rafting guide who's been paid a bonus to purposely steer your clients into the roughest possible water.

Storylines are how characters create the plots involved in their stories.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step.

When I write fiction, I have the illusion of being able to control these fictional worlds and these characters, and to make them say what I want them to say. Of course, the problem is that it is an illusion, and by the end of it you realize that you're not in control of it at all; the characters have taken over, and they're driving the vehicle.

Novels can be a snapshot of a moment in time, or several moments in time, and as a reader, that's what I really like, and as a writer, it's what I'm drawn to also.

I always say that characters must drive plots, never the reverse. Writing about large-scale events creates the risk that the scope of the events themselves can overwhelm the characters. I emphatically do not want that. That was the only trepidation I felt when I started 'The Twilight War.'

A volume of stories, bereft of continuity in plot and character, is often unified only by the writer's obsessiveness.

My characters aren't chess pieces. I don't move them around some big board. I actually care about these fictitious people.

Whatever the case, oftentimes, for a story to feel complete to me, I need more than one point of view.

One of the things that set us apart early on, as opposed to other animated shows, was the fact that 'Bojack' was continuous and serialized.

You don't idea your way into a plot but plot your way into an idea.

Every story is organic, and every story finds its own ending.

Content-driven films can make money - something that is gripping, is a journey of revelation and is relevant is cinema.

Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won't get over the right stile.

The characters have their own lives and their own logic, and you have to act accordingly.

Where are the beginnings, the endings, and most important, the middles?