V. S. Pritchett Quotes

Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can.

In terms of style, I think the memoirist should have a novelist's skill and all the elements of a novelist's toolbox. When I read a memoir, I want to really, deeply experience what the author experienced. I want to see the characters and hear the way they speak and understand how they think. And so in that way, writing a memoir feels similar to writing a novel.

There's an old adage in writing: 'Don't tell, but show.' Writing is not psychology. We do not talk 'about' feelings. Instead the writer feels and through her words awakens those feelings in the reader. The writer takes the reader's hand and guides him through the valley of sorrow and joy without ever having to mention those words.

I think if you want to make a good sports movie, you've got to cut down on the sports. You have to make it about people. You can't try to impress people with your knowledge and the X and O's and all the details and the technicalities.

I love writing from enclosed spaces: you really learn about your characters when they have tight walls to push against.

The great art of writing is the art of making people real to themselves with words.

I always think about the books I'm doing in pretty much the same way. I'm simply trying to write that particular novel as well as that particular novel can be written. I want to listen to what it is telling me, trying to figure out what it wants to do as much as what I want to do with it. There's a negotiation that's constant and ongoing between me and the material I'm working with, because I'm trying to listen to it.

The best books come from someplace deep inside.... Become emotionally involved. If you don't care about your characters, your readers won't either.

What I try to do in writing any character is to put myself in his position.

If you're writing about a character, if he's a powerful character, unless you give him vulnerability I don't think he'll be as interesting to the reader.

As a writer you see the big picture and how you can tell as one character, how your storyline is going to meet up with all these other storylines. And as an actor you're thinking of all the minutiae, all the very small details.

You have to write a song around this specific character or to enhance a specific scene. A lot of other craft goes on.

Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.

It's rather useless to write a gripping narrative with nothing in it but climate change because novels are always about people even if they purport to be about rabbits or robots.

Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it's work... Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything.

You can write a whole fiction, and you're talking to people who have gone through that, in real life. But the truth of it is that when you're talking to those people, you don't care about your movie anymore. You just want to hear about what they have gone through. You want all of the details. It's amazing.

I usually start writing stories from tone and not from content - kind of like people who create music and invent the lyrics later on.

Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.

When you write a character and their dialogue, you can't help imagining how you would be acting if you were them. You kind of have to relate to all of them. It's the most personal thing I've ever done.

I think you're always afraid when you go into like a big superhero movie that it's gonna be kinda just action and you're not gonna be able to just really go to the bottom of the characters.

Writing stories, adopting other characters, making up fantastic stories and tales, this is a way of perhaps enhancing who I am. Writing stories takes a commonplace old life and makes it all somehow more interesting. And hopefully I can do that in a way that touches a lot of people in their lives, too.

It can be hard to write a skillfully entertaining fiction, but a great book wants to be more, and wants more from us.

A lot of readers ask me, "Do you ever get emotional while writing the book?" or "Did you cry when you killed this character?" And the truth is, no, I didn't. That's not really the way I approach it. I don't get emotional while writing, but then there are plenty of other authors who do.

With writing, I think you have to be honest with yourself. I have a certain kind of writing; that is, I like to really embellish the human spirit. You have to write about something you have a feel for.