Brit Marling Quotes

The first book you write because of the way it makes you feel. The second one you can't help but wonder how it's going to make the reader feel.

If you give me a typewriter and I'm having a good day, I can write a scene that will astonish its readers. That will perhaps make them laugh, perhaps make them cry - that will have some emotional clout to it. It doesn't cost much to do that.

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.

Fans always say they laughed and they cried while reading my books. And I tell them that I laughed and cried while writing them.

Whether you want to entertain or to provoke, to break hearts or reassure them, what you bring to your writing must consist of your longings and disappointments.

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 I don't cry while writing a key emotional scene, my gut feeling is it's failed.

I need some kind of emotional stake in it to write my lyrics, assuming that place. It might just be an emotion I understand but am not currently experiencing necessarily.

I write characters and stories that move me, and I write from the heart.

I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it.

I really just sat down to write. I mean, I did what most writers do when something happens that's overwhelming, fascinating, moving, all of that.

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

When I do my best work, the stories tend to be pretty emotionally-charged.

Many people have told me that my books read like novels. Perhaps this is because, when I write, I feel I am really there, so strong is my feeling for my subject. On occasion, I have been so moved by the events I have been describing that I have felt like crying.

I know it's working when I'm writing a book if I'm laughing or crying.

That's the secret to anything we write. You have to bring your experience to it. Otherwise, how do you expect anyone else to connect to it?

There's some of me in all my characters.

In short, you have only your emotions to sell. This is the experience of all writers.

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

I think that, for physicians who want to become writers, they have the material, the smarts, they have the logic, they know the stories; it's just a matter of being able to connect with their emotional sides - that's the key to writing good fiction.

All fiction becomes autobiographical when the author has true talent.

I've always been a writer.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.