D. H. Lawrence Quotes

I was always at heart a novelist and wanted to tell a bigger story, so I wanted to create people who told other kinds of truths than literal truths.

I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.

The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.

I don't do nonfiction anymore. Eventually, you just feel constrained by the facts. You want to go where the words take you, and people's actual lives don't always conform. And you can't know them that well.

When you do fiction, it is your imagination you have put out there.

My job, in general, is nonfiction, so writing fiction was liberating. If you can't find the answer to something, you just make it up!

I think everybody is allowed, especially when they're telling a story, as long as it's not based on somebody's real life, you're allowed a certain liberty.

I don't have anything to prove as a writer anymore. I write about Panera Bread or Red Lobster or Satan or Richard Ramirez or whatever comes to mind. I just write.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

All novels are experimental.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

I feel like my brain is more geared towards a novel than it is to a movie.

It may sound very strange, but I love the freedom that writing a novel gives me. It is an unhindered experience. If I come after a bad day, I can decide that my protagonist will die on page 100 of my novel in a 350-page story.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.

I don't care whether the story is real or fantastical. I tell the story that needs to be told.

Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.

Writers can take offense when someone asks what's real or autobiographical in our work because, to us, that's not what counts. The bits taken from life are tiny scales on the dragon's tail - what about that whole beautiful writhing, fire-breathing dragon?

Quite casually I wander into my plot, poke around with my characters for a while, then amble off, leaving no moral proved and no reader improved.

I like that original romance of having a pen and a legal pad and going anywhere in the world and being able to write a novel with just those two things.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it's wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

Basically, I just write whatever story grabs me rather than considering the genre.

Novels give you the opportunity to create a whole world. Because you create people, you make them talk... You decide who they are, whether they live or die. It's the closest thing to feeling like a god that you can come to.

It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.