W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

I never want to be the all-knowing god of the story, manipulating what's to happen or the action.

It's unfortunate people can twist and turn things to fit whatever narrative they'd like it to fit.

I don't feel I have to struggle against allegory. I let the readers do the interpreting.

Don't let your characters tell you what to do. They can be pushy. Some writers say that they create characters and then just sort of follow them around through the narrative. I think that these writers are out of their minds.

An author's characters do what he wants them to do.

Authors of books are not given very much control over the films that are made from their books.

So many people had been asking me to write an autobiography, or threatening to write my biography without any input from me, that I thought I'd better tell my story before other people told it for me.

Whenever I write, I'm always thinking of the reader.

One of the questions writers bump up against in their work, whether they know it or not, is about lying. Because fiction is a form of deceit, and one's abilities are measured by how convincingly one can persuade readers that these events really happened.

It's been unsettling to discover that every form of narrative, even one that purports to tell the truth, is a kind of lying.

The portal structure is simply a technique: it is neither necessary nor unnecessary, except as the writer and the story make it so. In the case of 'The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant,' it was absolutely necessary to my intentions.

Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.

A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.

Don't see the point in reading ghost-written autobiographies, even though some of these published lives may fascinate me. The 'ghost' is always present, manipulating an interview into first-person singular text, and it feels like I'm reading a lie.

Naturally, the reader has access only to the events I show and the way I show them, but as has been said, there's generally a good deal of ambiguity in that presentation.

Readers always seem to think that the author has some control over the design of their books.

I don't write books inadvertently.

I'm very aware of the presence of a reader, and that probably is a reaction against a lot of poems that I do read which seem oblivious to my presence as a reader.

Once he became a series character, I made the conscious choice that he would never act like a series character, never wink at the reader, never pull his punches. Better for him, better for me.

Sometimes, like in 'Invisible Monsters,' I get too out of control, and instead of a plot point every chapter, I want a plot point in every sentence.

There are nineteen Harry Bosch books, and someone told me if you add up the descriptions of Harry from all of them, it would come to less than three pages. He's very elliptically described over the two decades during which the novels occur. I did that by intention.

I've got a poem that's in a lot of international anthologies called 'After the Anonymous Swedish' and I thought, 'Well, I'm a Swede. I can make up a Swedish poem.' It turned out pretty good.

I always say that characters must drive plots, never the reverse. Writing about large-scale events creates the risk that the scope of the events themselves can overwhelm the characters. I emphatically do not want that. That was the only trepidation I felt when I started 'The Twilight War.'

I'm never writing as a character.

I can't control what a reader takes from a story.