Peter Temple Quotes

What makes a good book? Scholars and critics have been debating that question for decades. I like books that touch my head and my heart at the same time.

The best novels are those that are important without being like medicine; they have something to say, are expansive and intelligent but never forget to be entertaining and to have character and emotion at their centre.

I love when I dive into lyrics that give me human complexity and intricate narrative.

I never really approach any project or story thinking of themes first or what a certain character 'represents.' Maybe other writers do, but for me, it just starts with the characters and a certain emotion I want to convey. It usually isn't until I get deeper into a book and look back a bit that I start to see the themes, etc.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

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

I love drama. Drama is, like, my thing. I want a movie that will move something inside me, that's going to shift something and keep me thinking.

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.

I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since.

The terms of poetry - some simple, some complicated, some ancient, some new - should bring us closer to what we're hearing, enlarging our experience of it, enabling us to describe what we're reading, to feel and think with greater precision.

I want to earn a reader's capacity to be moved.

A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.

I don't think you can cry if the script is rubbish. I have to feel it; it's as simple as that. It's just like if you're watching something moving, and you feel yourself welling up. It's the same thing. You're just being carried along with the story. There's nothing magical about it. I think I'm in touch with my emotions, and I can't help it.

At some point, I picked up an old library copy of 'To The Lighthouse' someone had bought for 25 cents. I began to read and didn't stop until the sun had blistered my back. A mysterious rightness, a beautiful submerged truth had invaded me, one that has ever since seemed slightly beyond my grasp.

The novel is a seduction; a reader has to be seduced.

What I also love about Lorrie Moore stories is they take me a long time to read. They're not easy for me because each sentence, I feel like, is so rich and dense, it just sends me off in a thousand directions.

Film is not an amazing medium to relay interiority. I think literature is much better for that.

All fiction, if it's successful, is going to appeal to the emotions. Emotion is really what fiction is all about. That's not to say fiction can't be thoughtful, or present some interesting or provocative ideas to make us think. But if you want to present an intellectual argument, nonfiction is a better tool. You can drive a nail with a shoe but a hammer is a better tool for that. But fiction is about emotional resonance, about making us feel things on a primal and visceral level.

Novels can fill in the spaces about what that emotional resonance is.

I like poems that affect me emotionally and also provoke me to further, deeper thought. I enjoy challenge, but not, I think, for its own sake.

A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways-by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov's crime.

You could omit anything if you knew that the omitted part would strengthen the short story and make people feel something more than they understood

A book should be a garden that fits in the hands. Word-petals of color. Stems of strength. roots of truth. Turn a page and turn the seasons. Read the sentence and enjoy the roses.

A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.

Levity, you need levity to feel anything. You need to laugh before you cry. I think films that take themselves too seriously without any levity are missing an important ingredient to the potential emotional impact of their stories.