Mason Cooley Quotes

While writing a novel, I don't read anything new in fiction. I am too engrossed.

To understand a literary style, consider what it omits.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

I purposely adopted a style in my storytelling wherein I don't have to explain everything or why the story is moving in a particular way.

The omniscient narrator is a bizarre technique, when you think about it, and no one uses it much anymore. But for the novels I want to write, it's the only approach that makes sense to me.

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.

When I tell people there are three stories in 'Thunderstruck' that were from the same wrecked novel, they want to guess what they are. Nobody has. There are no characters or timelines in common. They're structured very differently. A good novel wouldn't have pulled apart so easily.

My stories are full of facts; they have a beginning and an end. For that reason, they will never... occupy a place in contemporary literature.

Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.

Each author has his or her own voice. I read each book slowly so I can see the patterns they use to spread out the garden of earthly delights.

A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

In truth, even if they have an imperfect insight into their own methods, I still slightly mistrust writers of fiction who are assured literary critics; it makes me suspect that they favour the word over the world it should describe. Such scribes fall victim too easily to the solecism of equating style with morality.

I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.

If I want to write a movie, I'll write a screenplay, but if I have an idea for a book, it's something that I think can only be done novelistically.

My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

I am not Shakespeare or Hemingway, but I have written stories on tennis that were brilliant.

If you're writing an opinion piece, it's your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.

I don't start with the characters. I start with the series of events that will provide the conflict and how it can be resolved. Characters are incidental.

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

I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.

In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.