Jesmyn Ward Quotes

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.

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.

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.

I just try to write the best story I can, a story I would love to read, and hope that readers feel the same.

I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.

When I write fiction, I never try to deliver a message; I just want to tell a story. But I admit that I want the story to be memorable and the characters to touch the reader's heart.

Novels can be a snapshot of a moment in time, or several moments in time, and as a reader, that's what I really like, and as a writer, it's what I'm drawn to also.

I am a newspaper columnist and a professional screenwriter, but my real love is the novel for all the room it has for characters to come alive and breathe and face their challenges.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Each of my books is different. Deliberately... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.

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

It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

You start as an audience member and create a world you're interested in, and then you move into the telling of those stories, bringing what has interested you as an audience member.

One of the things that writing has taught me is that fiction has a life of its own. Fictional places are sometimes more real than the view from our bedroom window. Fictional people can sometimes become as close to us as our loved ones.

A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

You have to have empathy, knowledge and compassion for your characters if you're a writer.

If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.