Michael Koryta Quotes

To me, novels are a trip of discovery, and you discover things that you don't know and you assume that many of your readers don't know, and you try to bring them to life on the page.

I love telling stories. Creating a character, a world, a whole universe out of nothing. That part I can't get enough of.

What I like about writing novels is that I'm in my own world for nine months.

I'm always excited about stories that allow me to explore a character and create interesting stories and worlds that we haven't seen before.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

I don't plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn't be a closed system - it's a quest.

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.

There's nothing more fun to me than new characters and a new world.

Novels give you the opportunity to create a whole world. Because you create people, you make them talk... You decide who they are, whether they live or die. It's the closest thing to feeling like a god that you can come to.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

I like inventing things when I write rather than autobiography.

Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.

I like to jot down ideas on the back of envelopes and to recognise the potential value in small things. I also like the freedom to think without feeling compelled to write too early. Stories are often better if we can hold back and get to know the characters and the sounds of language.

I find my characters and stories in many varied places; sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts, lively dinner party conversations and some even crawl out of the dusty remote recesses of my imagination.

The good thing about writing a novel is that you're creating an imaginary world and can take a break when you need to.

In an essay, you have the outcome in your pocket before you set out on your journey, and very rarely do you make an intellectual or psychological discovery. But when you write fiction, you don't know where you are going - sometimes down to the last paragraph - and that is the pleasure of it.

In any genre you're working in, you can always find a way to tell a particular kind of story. I love fantasy; I love science fiction. I love all kinds of fiction, in fact.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth.

Most fiction comes from your experience.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant.

Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

The fiction writer in me likes gaps in stories because I can jump into that gap and try to suggest something.