Samantha Harvey Quotes

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

It's all about letting the story take over.

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

If one day a TV series comes into my head, and that is what I want to write, I'll write it. It just depends what story is in my brain at the time.

Where story comes from, I don't know. I know that I become obsessed with something. An idea, an image, a person, the way a person talks. And then something starts happening that I can't explain, and it has a lot to do with language.

I don't think I could write a book that had an ideological plan going in - I think that would be a terrible book.

When you do fiction, it is your imagination you have put out there.

Everything is so much clearer once a world is framed. Maybe it sounds crazy, but with writing, it's infinity that is limiting and the limited that allows for the truly infinite. Once all those elements are in place in a story, the brain is truly freed up to imagine without end.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

I throw everything I have into whatever story I'm writing - and so there's something immensely gratifying about finishing one piece and then starting fresh with a new setting, time period and cast of characters, getting to see the world through a completely different lens each time.

Even if I never sold another book, I'd keep writing, because the stories are here, in my head. Stories that just need to be told. I love watching a plot unfold, and feeling the surprise when the unexpected happens.

I think anything goes in fiction as long as it fits within the interior logic of the work itself and is presented in a disciplined manner.

I don't ever want to impose something on the story. I want the story to tell me.

I try and make little stories. Whether it's with a pencil or with bits of records, it's really the same thing.

Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.

I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.

Writing is a process of discovering. I could never outline a narrative; that just sounds boring. There's no joy of discovery in what you're doing if that's your strategy.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing.

I start with an idea that is no more than a paragraph long, and expand it slowly into an outline. But I'm always surprised by the directions things take when I actually start writing.

I think the idea of creating a character from scratch, one that has not been done in a novel or an existing story, is immensely exciting, terrifying and ultimately rewarding.