Sally Rooney Quotes

I tend to write one character at a time. But I don't write the entirety of one character at a time.

Robert Bolt's storytelling is the kind that I grew up with and aspired to.

I actually don't know much about Jaclyn Moriarty's process or where her stories come from or who inspired her characters. I just know that reading her books feels like sitting with friends. Her characters feel alive.

Early influences included Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Charles Baxter, Richard Ford, Alice Munro, Denis Johnson - writers who are important to me still and who I discovered through my teachers.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

I'm a strange kind of author - I like assignments. I wasn't clever enough to invent an iconic figure like Salander, but she's my kind of girl.

I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.

I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Characters are incredibly important, but I tend to build them around the plot during the outline stage. However, once I'm writing the manuscript, the characters I'm writing dictate how the plot unfolds.

An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.

Whenever people say they didn't like the main character of a book, they mean they didn't like the book. The main character has to be a friend? I don't get that.

There are things I read doing research, and there are certain books and writers I just love to read. There are books of Brian Morten's that I love, for instance. There's a wonderful book by an Australian writer named Helen Garner called 'The Children's Bach,' and I just love the way she uses language in it.

Literary fiction - if we must use the term - is not the plotless, meandering indulgence that its detractors would have you believe.

I love writing dialogue, and I think a lot of my writing is visual and very cinematic.

Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.

Your job as a writer is to find storylines, narrative structures, and characters to show the things that you believe rather than saying them or telling them.

You establish a technique on how to develop characters. Everyone does it their own way, and that's what makes it fun.

Novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

For me, plot always comes out of character, so I had to be sure of my characters.

Real novelists, those we admire, those we consider timeless in their language and character and scene, those who receive accolades for inventive language and form, have writing lives we imagine in specific ways.

I read many wonderful novels, though I now find the idea of literary fiction obsolete.

I write about characters that interest me. And I don't think of my books as being forms of entertainment.

'MotherFatherSon' was just an extraordinary read and I wanted to be a part of it.