Ann Maxwell Quotes

You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.

I've sort of dealt with the characters' lives more; particularly the women characters.

I get a stack of scripts, like, once a month, and most of the time, you find these placeholder girls that are there to provide a bounce for the male character. So we know he's funny because she's serious and she's mad at him. We know he's strong because she needs saving. So really, her job is to validate this personality trait of our hero or male.

I write novels about women, except for one: 'Rococo', about a man, a New Jersey decorator. But even that book had a woman on the cover.

I feel like it's too easy to just say, "We'll just change the name of this male character to a female, but have her do all the same things that a male does." I don't believe in that. I think there's something else. I think there's more to women than that.

No woman or man is any one thing and the men in my stories, well, some of them are good and some of them are terrible, and most of them make the lives of the women they love much harder than need be. Why? Because that's the kind of storytelling I was drawn to when I wrote these stories, most of which are at least seven years or more old.

I really like the short stories that Melissa Bank writes. I think she's sort of channeling the female version of J.D. Salinger in more recent days.

When we create female characters, I think often there is a tendency to kind of make female characters emotionally bulletproof.

I like my male characters as much my female characters, but I always seem to have less for them to say.

I'm a very girlie girl, but I often find the heroes of my books trying to take over the story. In truth, I enjoy writing the male point of view more than any other.

Even with the lowest budget in the world, you better get some names in there; that calms people down. Then be sure your leading character is in a hurry.

Roles for women need to be better written.

Even though I am a woman boxer, I am not just inspiring women; I hope I am inspiring boys as well.

I never set out to be the man who writes a lot of female characters.

I don't want to be like other authors and say that there are only a few story lines in literature. A story is like a human face. We have as many stories as human faces. You might have similar facial features, but they're all a little different.

I remember my agent calling and saying 'this may be really weird, but would you have any interest in WWE?' I was like, 'isn't that wrestling? And the last time I saw a WWE match was in my women's studies class at the University of Michigan, and they picked it apart. But she implored me to watch, and instantly I was interested.

I don't know what that line is between fiction and non-fiction that other people have in their minds, but to me, when I'm writing, it's just like whatever the next sentence should be is the next sentence. It's not this artificial division.

It may be time for serious literary novelists to take back some of the subject matter we abandoned to hack novelists and the movies.

Very often, as an actress, there's some kind of stereotype, but with any good script, you should be able to swap the genders of all the characters, and it shouldn't make a huge difference.

Just like how male actors get to play varied characters, I would also like to play characters that people don't normally see female characters portraying on screen.

I'm a woman, and I'm interested in writing stories from a female perspective.

I'm very proud of the fact that the women on 'The Americans' are written to be equally complex as the men.

I think most short story writers, at one time or another, over the course of several books, naturally skirt near the edge of one genre or another.

I used to say I wasn't interested in writing about characters.

Alice Munro is an atomic writer blasting doors into narrative time.