Michael Hirst Quotes

The MFA program did one great thing for me: It taught me how to be a better reader and critic. Nothing I wrote during my time at Columbia remains - but learning how to really deconstruct a work of fiction - that, of course, is a permanent part of me now.

It really helps if you know your subject matter immediately. I find that enormously useful because then you can concentrate on all the usual novelistic things - the character, the plot and so forth - and you don't have to spend an enormous amount of time learning another trade, essentially.

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

Writing was something I have always been interested in. I've grown up in a household full of books, with both my parents English teachers and very booky.

Every pilot I've ever written, I've fallen deeply and madly in love with. It's the only way I work.

I hope the wonder of what happens to my characters never goes away. That yearning keeps me writing.

Due to the sweeping time frame and the voices moving back and forth, the outline for 'The Invention of Wings' was the strangest one I've ever done. I created six large, separate outlines, one for each part of the book, and hung them around my study.

My passion has always been books and literature, and teaching.

Read as much as you can, and then sit down and write.

I can give advice to anyone interested in writing in one word: Read! I think it's much more important to be a reader than to be a writer!

It's good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it's very pleasing after writing something like 'Atonement' or 'On Chesil Beach,' which are historical, to get involved in some plausible re-enactment of the here and now.

At least for me, it takes more knowledge to write fiction than nonfiction. At least about someplace that I begin with a lot of ignorance about.

I've always been a reader and a writer.

My first two novels were set in the past, and that freed me up in a lot of ways; it allowed me to find my way into my story and my characters through research.

I've done projects where I've read 25 books and did all kinds of journal and character work for hours.

When you're actually inside the experience of writing something, in some ways, you're just writing. Ultimately, you fall in love with the characters, and you get excited about the story, and you're sitting there in your sweatpants or pajamas, and you do get a little lost in it.

I tend not to meet the people I write about because I'm not really interested in the people I write about as people. I don't want to know about their family life. I don't want to know about their bad habits or their good deeds. I'm interested in their work.

Ever since I was a kid, I have loved writing. It has always been one of my passions.

There are people who say they want to write novels. They think, 'I'll learn my craft on the romance novel.' If you don't love the genre, it's going to show, and it's not going to be a good book.

I taught English and history, so my education for that really helped prepare me for writing historical fiction.

I hope to continue writing. I hope to continue teaching.

My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives.

I'm an efficient, good, professional reporter. But I also write. And so what I try to do is write about places that I know that I care about intensely and write about them in a way that conveys the fact that I care.

I tell people you should write what you love to read because that's where your passion is.

The opportunity to be a storyteller is the greatest thing in the world, and I feel so lucky and really love it.