Manuel Puig Quotes

A movie is a movie and a book is a book, and they have different rules.

Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.

TV's job is to make you lean in, and a film's job is to make you lean back.

There's a different experience when you're reading a book rather than when you're seeing something on screen. When you're seeing a movie or TV show, it's a three-dimensional experience you're in the middle of, but when you're reading something, you're suppling the reality with your imagination.

There's no difference between movies and television. None at all. Except in a lot of cases, television's much better than movies.

Stories are great, but at the end of the day, you remember that moment and that moment and that moment. 'The Avengers' had all of this great, giant action, but for all of the clever dialogue, it's the moments.

But I'm a fairly mechanical worker - I tend not to think about themes so much as plot. I want to get the feeling right. If it's moving through tunnels, I ask myself, what is it like to move through tunnels?

The very best way I can make any reader believe in the nuts and bolts of an art form... is to know the mechanics, to make the characters grounded in convincing detail.

I write the kinds of novels I like to read, where the setting is rendered with love and care.

I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer, I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me.

My view of an excellent novel was probably set in the golden age of fiction in the 19th century: narrative, character and voice are of equal importance.

The short story seems like the best of all possible worlds. I do feel it is closer to writing poetry than to writing a novel, with its requirements of concentration and economy.

The mark of a writer is to make a story as likely as possible, and I've done my best to deliver authentic atmosphere.

It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, John Updike... Eudora Welty - that I became excited about the possibilities of writing.

I tell the story by feel most of the time, and I am not much given to labyrinthian digressions but seem to be naturally drawn to compression and pace, and the feelings come about on their own.

The novelist, he's not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He's someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.

I grew up not reading fiction; I watched movies and read comic books, and one of the ways I taught myself to think about narrative was through film.

What makes a story is how well it manages to connect with the reader, the visceral effect it has.

Television contracts the imagination and radio expands it.

Personally, I love books, and I am interested in the notion that stories are told better in different media depending on the story.

I read many wonderful novels, though I now find the idea of literary fiction obsolete.

I'm not working on the Great American Novel. All I am doing, I hope, is entertaining readers.

The way one perceives a book and a film are totally different. You read a book in the privacy of your room. You are the boss; you set the pace and rhythm of your reading. In the movie house, you can't do that.

I like looking at a book and asking myself, 'How do I replicate that experience I just had as a reader?'

When I am experiencing a complex story or novel, the broader planes, and also details, tend to fall away.