John C. McGinley Quotes

I write plays instinctively. I don't like writing movie scripts.

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.

I can't change overnight into a serious literary author. You can't compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

I would probably do anything with David Mamet. He's so great. I just love his writing.

Out of respect to writers, you have to read the book in the way in which the author visualised it going out into the world.

No writer must be measured by a word or paragraph. He is to be measured by his work - by the tendency, not of one line, but by the tendency of all.

I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.

It's very important to understand that the 'Talk' piece was not an excerpt, it was an adaptation, which means I compressed different parts of the book and made a new piece.

But I do think it's important to remember that writers do not have a monopoly of wisdom on their books. They can be wrong about their own books, they can often learn about their own books.

The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.

I think that if you get too close to the character, if you do too much historical research, you may find yourself defending your view of a character against the author's view, and I think that's terribly dangerous.

I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer.

The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

I wrote the first draft of 'Madame Bovary' without studying the previous translations, although I gathered them and took the occasional peek.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

What does Sinclair know about anything? He's just a writer.

I get scripts and think, 'There's not enough here to get my teeth stuck into.' That's a result of studying English, where you luxuriate in these big, lush novels.

I am terribly interested in the paragraph: the paragraph as an object, the construction, and the possibilities of what a paragraph can do.

There's nothing sacred about the book you've written. The Bible says there's safety in a multitude of counselors. The movie is the movie, and the book is the book. They're different critters, and each must stand on their own merits.

I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it "intently political." I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.

People don't understand how much influence they can actually have on a writer, how much a writer's feelings can be hurt, how much they can deflect his course when they raise their voices like they did over highly personal books like 'Panama' or 'Bullet Park.'

Books like Munro's are so deeply personal and idiosyncratic that it feels like a violation to subject them to the crude business of committee meetings and PR releases; you might as well storm a butterfly den with a klieg light.

It really helped me as a writer to understand how other writers think.