Anthony Marra Quotes

I want to earn a reader's capacity to be moved.

Writers write for one reason: to create an emotion in the reader, to reach across and make them feel something. You want a reaction. Yeah, it's nicer when the reaction is to throw flowers than it is to throw brickbats, but you have to accept both equally.

I go to great lengths to make certain situations feel right to the reader.

We give you this story. It is for the audience to be moved and gut wrenched, not us. It isn't as if we don't go through those real feeling and it isn't as if I don't cry three or four times a night. I usually do.

It's very simple, I just tell my sad story, and people weep.

I don't think you can cry if the script is rubbish. I have to feel it; it's as simple as that. It's just like if you're watching something moving, and you feel yourself welling up. It's the same thing. You're just being carried along with the story. There's nothing magical about it. I think I'm in touch with my emotions, and I can't help it.

If a reader comes across a story that makes them cry, you can be sure that the writer felt every single thing that makes the reader cry.

It is only possible through the fact that sympathy for the general life and suffering of mankind is very weakly developed in the individual.

You can watch someone on-stage cry and cry - but in the audience you feel nothing. It's easy to become indulgent. For me, what's important is the story first.

I love to entertain, I love to make people laugh, cry, and move them, perhaps moving them in their lives.

I think it's very easy to disgust the reader with violence on the page - that's incredibly easy - but it's far harder to make a reader care about a character.

When I'm sitting writing, I know that something works if I've made myself cry, or laugh, or have a visceral emotion.

I don't cry at books or movies. Ever. So imagine my shock and awe when I read 'The Time Traveler's Wife' for the second time, and I knew the ending, and I started to cry.

It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.

Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.

Above all, I try to create an emotion to which others can respond.

I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.

I don't want to make people cry - unless it's with happiness.

It's the writer's job to disarm the reader of his logic, to just make the reader feel.

When I make a film, the yardstick is my mind. If I laugh at the jokes and feel sad at the serious undersides, then the subject works.

When you talk about a reader being emotionally moved, a feeling of empathy, I think that comes out of that line-by-line respect for reader. That's actually where it all comes from.

I'm constantly on the brink of tears in conversation about things that happen to people.

When your fear touches someone’s pain, it becomes pity, when your love touches someone’s pain, it become compassion.

If a character dies, you should feel that. If a character accomplishes something, you should feel that. That's where you try to find that balance. It's impossible to articulate, as you go through it. You just have to recognize it.

There are times when the mirth of others only saddens us, especially the mirth of children with high spirits, that jar on our own quiet mood.