Tobias Hill Quotes

Truth may be stranger than fiction on a plot and narrative basis, but fiction can investigate tone in a way that things based on a true story can't.

I think the benefit of being a writer is that I'm looking for the subtext on the page, because all good writing has subtext. And as a writer, you look at the big scope of things, the big story, rather than just your individual story line, because I think it's important to know what you're in and how you fit into it.

I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.

A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.

The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

My job as an author - at least the way I think of it - is to make a story that is coded and puzzling enough to entice conversation and interpretation, but also to do the opposite: to make some things clear so that it is meaningful in some way, not just a random assemblage of ideas.

I am obsessed with story. I had a late awakening in life. In college was the first time that I understood what you could do with a story and what a good novel is - literary value and subtext and irony and everything.

As I work, I see my writing - each scene, each chapter, each section, each book - in three-act structures and classic myths, and I analyze them through the handy filter of the detective story.

When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.

I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that all clings together.

I would say what Mad Men has taught me has been a super elevated evaluation of text in general, and understanding subtext, and understanding where a character comes from - what he means by this or by that.

But I'm a fairly mechanical worker - I tend not to think about themes so much as plot. I want to get the feeling right. If it's moving through tunnels, I ask myself, what is it like to move through tunnels?

Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.

In general, my own experience of writing an adaptation of 'Evening' gave me a chance to get into different parts of the book.

I've never sat down and thought about the difference between plot and theme. To me, that's never been important.

I like looking at a book and asking myself, 'How do I replicate that experience I just had as a reader?'

I believe that sometimes, when we talk about books, we're talking about the big picture - how they're relevant.

I never want to write a book just to tell a story. There is always something deeper going on.

No formal course in fiction-writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce.

Edith Wharton was a natural story-teller. As plots do in real life, hers flow directly from character. Her prose is so effortlessly elegant that you're rarely aware as they purl by that the sentences are so pretty. More concerned with what is put than how it is put, she also understood that you only say anything at all when you say it well.

I retain characters more often than plot, but what seems to happen is that I latch on to specific moments, turns of phrase, and dialogue as touchstones for me to recall what happened in the book. Kind of like freeze-frame.

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.