Milan Kundera Quotes

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 think that every book that's in a bookstore should entertain in some way.

What a good novelist does with a throwaway that serves no fictional purpose is throw it away.

I try to write short novels and leave details out not because I want to be minimalist, but because I think that it enables the readers' creativity and interaction with the book.

Every film that you make has to have a scene that is the heart that blood flows through in every other scene. That scene doesn't always have to be in the beginning of the film. But it can also be at the end, or in the middle, and that can sometimes make the film more effective.

Short fiction encourages experimentation, and it's fun to play with form and try experiments that may or may not work out.

I am really excited by the form of short fiction.

The short story is kind of a precision tool. It allows me a certain type of freedom to go in and out of the American landscape, without having to commit myself to a full-length novel. I find a lot of novels out there very boring.

You may not be a fan of Twitter-fiction. That's okay. There are novels out there for you - big ones.

The short story has been here and is here and will be here as long as we are.

I love movies, but I would love to write as many graphic novels as people would read from me.

Unlike a novel, where you expect a different kind of arc that leaves us with a somber sense of resolution, I think a story in some ways as like a train window: being able to watch the landscape pass for a certain amount of time. And then your stop arrives, and you have to leave.

I suppose I reached the limit of what I could do with nonfiction books, perhaps because they never felt quite intense enough - it's a journalistic enterprise, ultimately, even if you are using the memoir as a form.

If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.

With non-fiction writing I feel like I'm confined and driven by what actually happened. That makes the "plot". So it's a process of getting all of my notes typed up, then scanning through the notes, trying to extract or find certain vignettes that seem like they might write well - that might have a potential for good energy, shape, etc. And then at some point I start stringing these together, keeping an eye on the word count.

There is a reason there is no such thing as a folk writer. But to be a writer you have learn what it takes to captivate a reader in order to make them turn the page. And in order to learn that, you have to read.

The fact, and the intuition or logic about the fact, are severe coordinates in fiction. In the short story they must cross with hair-line precision.

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

Short stories do not say this happened and this happened and this happened. They are a microcosm and a magnification rather than a linear progression.

There are vast differences between scripts and stories, of course. Few fiction writers would want to give up the opportunity to explore how the minds of their characters work, or to set aside the opportunity to provide necessary background exposition in a succinct fashion.

Every story we remember is a novel. Novels make things more universal.

A novel is a performance you have to plan.

I'm one of those writers who started off writing novels and came to writing short stories later, partly because I didn't have the right ideas, partly because I think that short stories are more difficult. I think learning to write short stories also made me attracted toward a paring down of the novel form.

Becoming a writer can kind of spoil your reading because you kind of read on tracks. You're reading as someone who wants to enjoy the book but also, as a writer, noticing the techniques that the writer uses and especially the ones that make you want to turn the page to see what happened.

This world of ours has been constructed like a superbly written novel: we pursue the tale with avidity, hoping to discover the plot.