Elmore Leonard Quotes

People always say, "Can writing be taught?" I always think, I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to do dialogue, how to do character, but I can't teach you how to be a decent person, and I can't teach you how to have something to say.

Experience is an author's most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.

My job as an author is to tell the story in the best way possible, to make it flow seamlessly and get the reader to keep turning the page.

I try to imagine the scenes as I'm writing them as if I were watching them play like a film.

I'd like to know what I could do if I really had the time to spend on writing a book, with no columns or shows to do at the same time.

Writing a novel that works is an extremely difficult thing to do. It requires a level of skill and dedication that always surprises me.

Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can.

There is poetry in fiction. If you cannot see it and feel it when you write, you need to step back and examine what you are doing wrong. If you have not figured out how to write a simple declarative sentence and make it sing with that poetry, you are not yet ready to write an entire book.

The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.

When I start to write, I see my stories as a kind of movie. For instance, I ask myself, "What kind of opening do I want for this book?"

I always write with images. I cannot write a book if I don't have images.

Siobhan said that when you are writing a book you have to include some descriptions of things. I said that I could take photographs and put them in the book. But she said the idea of a book was to describe things using words so that people could read them and make a picture in their own head.

You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.

I try to create new characters in each book I write. That's what makes writing fun and interesting for me.

Writing books isn't a drastic departure from writing for the stage.

When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.

What I try to do in writing any character is to put myself in his position.

I write books that way - I put a first line down and say, "Where does this go?"

When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.

If you get the characters right you've done sometimes nearly half the work. I sometimes find I get the characters right then the characters will often help me write the book - not what they look like that's not very important - what people look like is not about their character. You have to describe the shape they leave in the world, how they react to things, what effect they have on people and you do that by telling their story.

I don't really have the gift of the sustained narrative that you need to write a book. I've tried a couple of times, and it just doesn't work. But I get some good passages, so what I'm going to do is just take sections out of them.

You always try to do your own thing. One of the things I wanted to do was to write a book that combines some of the best traits of contemporary fantasy with some of the traits of the historical novel.

I'm excited to bring my characters to life in book form.

I'm here to get the story on to the page. It would be good to catch your attention, and I have to make you want to read on, and I suppose I prefer you don't actually think about the 'how' at all - the writing technique, the 'style', or even who it is that's putting this together.

There's a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That's what writers do when they're good.