Arthur Golden Quotes

I'm very comfortable writing in the first person; it dives into the character in a way that's difficult if you're writing in the third person.

When I first concluded to print the book, I made an honest effort to construct it in the third person.

For me, the easiest thing to figure out is the story I want to tell, and the hardest thing is to figure out the voice that's gonna tell it. And that's why I finish very little.

I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.

I have never successfully written in the third person. If there's a rhythm or a musicality that interests me, I become obsessed with the character, and I just have this need to spend time with him or her. Sometimes I'll be in the park playing ball, and I'll hear a kid say something that I've never heard before. Sometimes one word can set me off.

I try to have a mood or a rhythm for a chapter.

The novelist in me is probably hiding behind all the stories I write, looking for ways to connect them and continue the conversation with readers. Maybe I'm writing one long narrative, and each book, however different from the last, is just a chapter.

I've never set out to seduce my reader. I don't see him at all clearly.

Novelists seem to fall into two distinct categories - those that plan and those that just see where it takes them. I am very much the former category.

I like to think that I am telling a story rather than writing it.

As any competent student of literary composition knows, the more natural and casual a voice sounds in print, the more likely it is to have been edited time and again.

I think that if you have a knack for storytelling, and you work really hard at it, you'll have a chance to tap into something deep. But the fact remains that good sentences are hard won. Any writer worth a lick knows constructing a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter is hard work.

I think striking the right tone for your story is, if you like, the alchemical work of writing.

I try to leave out the parts readers skip.

I have heard of novels started in the middle, at the end, written in patches to be joined together later, but I have never felt the slightest desire to do this.

When it comes to the form the narrative will take, whether first person, third person, or Aunt Grace's cat, I usually find that the story tells me which voice it prefers, and that often changes as I go along. And in the end it really doesn't matter as long as the author can rig those voices all in harness to pull the same load.

John Irving once told me he doesn't start a novel until he knows the last sentence. I said, 'My God, Irving, isn't that like working in a factory?'

All my characters have got a big slice of me in them. A big piece of me, because it's my dialogue and this is the way I think and talk.

Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don't think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously.

Understanding POV is essential, or ought to be.

I think that a classic style in writing tends to remove the reader one level from the immediacy of the experience. For any normal reader, I think a colloquial style makes him feel more as though he is within the action, instead of just reading about it.

When I started writing 'A Million Little Pieces,' I felt like it was the right story with the style I had been looking for, and I just kept going.

I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.

It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.

I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!