Sarah Hall Quotes

To be interested in short stories, you have to be interested in fiction as an art form.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

In workshopping short stories I learned how to get character down, and how to work with ratios of literal to fantastic to make a world that people can believe in even if it's a little wild or out there.

I want to be one of those serious, moody writers.

I've always thought that, as a romance writer, I had the best job in the world. I sit around all day making up emotion-drenched, conflict-laden stories that push my heroes and heroines to the edge of sanity. Then I give them a happy ending.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.

Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out.

If I ever wrote a script myself, it would be strongly emotional material.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

Every once in a while I feel the tremendous force of the novel. But it does not stay with me.

I never think of an entire book at once. I always just start with a very small idea. In 'Holes,' I just began with the setting; a juvenile correctional facility located in the Texas desert. Then I slowly make up the story, and rewrite it several times, and each time I rewrite it, I get new ideas, and change the old ideas around.

Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.

I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.

As fiction writers, we are entertainers.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

I think many people would say that writers like Stephen King have hypergraphia.

The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.