Gunter Grass Quotes

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

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

My instinct is to absolutely recoil when talking about writing in a mechanistic way. Nothing could be dumber than writing a film or TV script based on prescriptions, on other peoples' ideas of what character should be.

There are many ways to go about a story. And if you give yourself some formal constraints, it just makes the job so much - maybe 'easier' isn't the right word, but because you know your boundaries, you can just play within those boundaries much more, so it's much more fun to do.

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

I have seen too many screenwriters of promise become formula addicts and slaves to stop watch structure. Spend that time watching movies, reading screenplays, reading plays, and most importantly - write from your gut.

If you set out to write an adjective novel, you're setting out to write a mediocre novel; your allegiance is to the adjective, not to the story, and then that just sucks all the joy right out of it.

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

I think the plasticity of the novel is its greatest challenge. There are no rules; there is no necessary form. You can know what you want it to be, or do, and still not know how to write it. There are endless possibilities, infinite choices. What voice should it be in? What events to start with? What characters will be part of it?

My first two novels were set in the past, and that freed me up in a lot of ways; it allowed me to find my way into my story and my characters through research.

In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.

Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

Working within the limitations of the shared world generally made the writing easier, because I didn't have to invent any of the characters or background, which is usually the hardest part.

As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.

You have to write your own story, your own graph and rhythm.

Everything is so much clearer once a world is framed. Maybe it sounds crazy, but with writing, it's infinity that is limiting and the limited that allows for the truly infinite. Once all those elements are in place in a story, the brain is truly freed up to imagine without end.

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.

You can be imaginative, you have the technology to convert your vision, you have the freedom to write the kind of stories you want to tell beyond the set formulas. Also, you have varied platforms to tell different kinds of stories.

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It's a story.

Our minds simply don't function in some sort of narrative chronology. I think that one of the great gifts of writing fiction is being able to think about that.

If writing a novel is a year's exile to a foreign country, writing a short story is a weekend spent somewhere exotic. They're much more like vacations, more exciting and different, and you're off.

To me, stretching the capabilities of my imagination is a crucial aspect of writing fiction; you could think of it as a mental form of athleticism.

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

I had no real idea I was going to become a writer. It was just a game for me. I just liked pretending, daydreaming and imagining.