Tayari Jones Quotes

Writing a novel is a lot like reading one.

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

I like to create characters and worlds, and there's nothing like telling your own stories.

I had originally been looking at writing, including fiction.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.

There is always something of the writer in the work but I don't think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I've written, that would truly be an extraordinary story.

Writers are magpies, and we collect details about people and we use them for fictional characters.

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

Writers spend too much time among dead things. I thought that was profound and actually true, that you're trying to pump life into something that is inanimate. You see what a sort of audacious thing it is to move these sort of imaginary people around in a very stylized and patterned world.

Writing a novel proved to be the hardest, most self-analyzing task I had ever attempted, far worse than an autobiography: and its rewards were greater than I expected.

Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

Creating the characters is the most creative part of the novel except for the language itself. There I am, sitting in front of my computer in right-brain mode, typing the things that come to mind - which become the seeds of plot. It's scary, though, because I always wonder: Is it going to be there this time?

Everyone has early fiction fantasies, but it wasn't until my second child Betsy was born that I allowed the urge to write a novel bubble up.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

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.

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

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

I should tell you that many people think that authors just cut and paste from real life into books. It doesn't work quite that way.