Akhil Sharma Quotes

I wanted to see if I could create something that is emotional between people. Existing games are about killing each other or killing something together. The idea of social emotion means people need to share feelings. At that moment, the players are in sync. The problem [with many games] is there's no chance to share emotion. Most of them are busy, [there are] explosions everywhere. So we got rid of all the background noise and we had to get rid of the guns.

Recreating the experience of, say, bereavement in my own head is pretty rough. I was used to switching off from emotions every day of my working life as a journalist, but in fiction, you have to feel it 100%, or else it's a flat experience for the reader.

If you ever want to understand multitasking in prose, James Joyce is your man.

There are so many kinds of love, and they're all very intense for me.

Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.

Some years ago, I read Thomas Carlyle's history of the French Revolution, and I was very taken by the way he told the story, and it seemed as though I was right in the middle of things. And it took me a while to figure out how he achieved that effect, and one of the ways was to write it in the present tense.

I'm a huge fan of not doing world-building or exposition. My eyes glaze over when I see it.

The omniscient narrator is a bizarre technique, when you think about it, and no one uses it much anymore. But for the novels I want to write, it's the only approach that makes sense to me.

I think it's really important, when you're redefining a character [ Spider-Man], for the audience to experience things that they haven't experienced, from the ground up. I wanted to build a character. I feel like point of view is a really crucial thing in the story, and that you need to build up the emotional building blocks, so that you can experience all the other emotions in a very specific way, rather than just experiencing it in an intellectual way.

When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller.

One must laugh and weep, love, work, enjoy and suffer, in short vibrate as much as possible in all his being.

The great majority of modern third-person narration is "I" narration very thinly disguised.

There are a couple of writers I admired who were very good at giving the character's emotion without stating what that emotion was. Not saying "He was feeling tense," instead saying, "His hand squeezed harder on the chair arm," as if staying outside the guy. I wanted to try doing that. I wanted to have a really emotional story in which the characters' emotions are never straight - out told to you, but you get it.

The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.

I'm totally into the emotional aspect of things.

I have always wanted to do a book about actors because I think that the death of a character is a tremendously emotional experience.

Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to you. Find expression for a joy, and you will intensify its ecstasy.

Full of thrills and tension - but smart and human too.

In real life, when you have an emotional experience, it's never just because of the thing that's been said. There's the backstory. It's like [Ernest] Hemingway's iceberg theory - the current emotional moment is the tip of the iceberg and all of the past is the seven-eighths of the iceberg that's underwater.

You need emotional content.

Anyone who says he is not emotional is not getting what he should out of life.

A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is.

Writing, for me, is a combination of objective and subjective approach. You take an objective approach at times to get you through things, and you take a subjective approach at other times, and that allows you to find an emotional experience for the audience.

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is.

I’m not interested in the words or the meaning of the words. I’m interested in disappearing in it completely, to not be aware of yourself at all. That’s the way music works for me. It’s purely emotional. It goes straight to the heart. There are no explanations. That’s just it.