James Howe Quotes

My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow.

That's the fine balance of a fiction writer...to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I'm 100 percent fiction writer... I don't want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don't state my political messages to anybody.

I'd rather let the fiction speak for itself and I don't want to write fiction that tells people how to feel, and I don't want to be judgmental in the fiction.

I hear people talk in my head, and I write it down. I choose where they live and how they dress to be real.

The character I created, 'Commissario Brunetti,' who appears in all my books, shares similar reading, artistic and musical tastes with me. Subconsciously, I knew that if I was to spend however long it would take to write this book with him, this man would have to be someone I'd like to have dinner with.

People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.

I'm going to try to tell stories and let each tale skate its own way into dark or light territory as the needs of the story steer me.

I think we think in terms of stories.

Especially when I write, I want to get out of people's heads and have them speak and have them get dressed and have them go to work.

Successful fiction does not need to be validated by 'real life'; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is 'real'.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

A novel wouldn't be a book if there weren't some flights of fancy on the part of the author, stopping time to examine things, or to tell a joke.

I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.

I have the power to write these books where I invent characters that I really like, and it gets to come out the way they want it to come out, and I get to make it happen.

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

Size has nothing to do with literature. All legs are long enough to touch the ground, and all books are big enough to fill their covers.

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

Tricker the Squirrel is the best piece I ever wrote. It's intricate.

Because they feel that without them telling you to do this, you wouldn't have had the characters that you have, you wouldn't have the book that you have.

I don't have a great eye for detail. I leave blanks in all of my stories. I leave out all detail, which leaves the reader to fill in something better.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It's the thing that people create.

I never wrote my books especially for children.