Tana French Quotes

Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name.

As a writer, when you fall in love with a place, you want to spend more time in it, either physically or mentally, and so you write about it.

One of the things I try to do with my writing is try to evoke the spirit of the place. I think these things imprint on the landscape and the culture.

I get very attached to places.

If you look at my characters as a group, they all have a different relationship with the way that places can signify emotion in them - and the way those bonds can be shattered.

I do not think about absent persons as often or with such intense longing as I think of places. They lie one below the other in my mind.

It's a foreground of my feeling. That place moves me. And I don't mean my country; it's part of our shared natural world that happens to be particular to a sense of wherever my storytelling inclinations come from and my own history of kind of being a road rat and travelling.

Location pertains to feelings - feelings are bound up in place.

Where we live in the world is never one place. Our hearts, those dogged mirrors, keep flashing us moons before we are ready for them.

I'd rather feel empathy for a character that's fictional, so it doesn't quite tie into personal experience as much.

It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London.

All of that loneliness and longing in my heart got transferred into the book Because of Winn-Dixie, I guess.

There's music in my films but you seldom hear it. Very early I got the idea that the important things in films were people - the actors. They are the intermediary between the director and the audience. They make direct contact. People to people communication.

You can't write if you can't relate.

In my entire career, I've never cried, consistently, through a movie, ever.

I would hope that people, no matter what age, would find something to identify with in my books, pick one up and experience a personal sense of discovery. That's great. But for them, not for me.

My home is such a powerfully imaginative place that the space is almost irrelevant. I think the house I live at on the Hudson is where I belong because it's the only place where I am that I never think about when I'm leaving.

I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one.

On the plane, I like to read fiction set in the location I'm going to. Fiction is in many ways more useful than a guidebook, because it gives you those little details, a sense of the way a place smells, an emotional sense of the place. So, I'll bring Graham Greene's The Quiet American if I'm going to Vietnam. It's good to feel romantic about a destination before you arrive.

Why is it that you can sometimes feel the reality of people more keenly through a letter than face to face?

The artists that I love- whether painters or filmmakers- it's because something resonates in me because I've felt it.

I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true [...].

I hope in my book [My Beloved World], that the sense that I really feel connected comes through.

I'd like to do something that hits close to home.

I think Grace [Dunham] and I are always working from a personal place, and the fact that these were issues that we'd been talking about in our own families really clicked, but also Jason's [Benjamin] passion about it and his clear sense that this was going to be something emotional and remarkable to watch. It was very hard not get excited about it and want to help in any way we could.