Martine Syms Quotes

I like making stories and characters that people can relate to. I also like giving the audience a departure from whatever they're thinking about in their life and enjoying a show or a movie.

I think of myself as a storyteller, and that is it.

I don't write autobiographically.

We are writing fiction, but we are trying to create a world that's believable.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an idea.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

I have no particular reader in mind, but a passionate desire to tell an honest, moving story.

I just want to tell a good story, so I always ask myself, 'Are these people real to me?'

When writing fiction, you only have to know enough to be convincing on the page. I mean really convincing, of course - but you don't need academic depth.

Fundamentally, I think of myself as a storyteller, not a writer.

As fiction writers, we are entertainers.

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

Fiction is about telling a good story, first and foremost. But of course, everything I'm interested in or angry about leaks into my writing, from art to violence against women.

I like to think of myself as a storyteller.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

One of the things that writing has taught me is that fiction has a life of its own. Fictional places are sometimes more real than the view from our bedroom window. Fictional people can sometimes become as close to us as our loved ones.

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'm a fan of great storytelling.

I wrote a novel. It's called 'The Middlesteins.' It's fiction. It's not a memoir. I'm not a spokesperson.

I think of myself as a storyteller.

I think it's Jerry's masterful fiction writing.

As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real.