Terrence McNally Quotes

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 tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

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

I've never been comfortable with the idea of using family and friends in stories. Which is why it takes me longer than something else. Because you make them up out of nothing. Doing that is harder.

What do you do in a novel? You take recognizable characters from your own life, and you fantasize about what they're really like.

A lot of things that I write about have happened to people around me, if not necessarily to me or in the organizations I've worked in. Having said that, it's fiction and has a lot to do with my imagination and creativity.

I get a lot of energy from making things up, which is why I feel I'm a novelist.

There's no game plan when it comes to thinking up new characters; inspiration can come from anything - from a wig I've seen to an expression I've heard someone use.

I sort of love reading the scripts and going, 'Oh wow, what a great idea. I never would have thought of that.'

I prefer writing originals.

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

I don't actually have a one wellspring of inspiration. Though I'm most often inspired while reading - both fiction and nonfiction.

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'm always determined that as a novelist I'm going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.

There's a mystery to writing, and you don't really know where most of it comes from.

At a certain moment, I decided to write a story. I had no more small children to tell them stories.

I think the idea of creating a character from scratch, one that has not been done in a novel or an existing story, is immensely exciting, terrifying and ultimately rewarding.

I make things up for a living. It would be pretty boring to just fictionalize real people.

I don't do nonfiction anymore. Eventually, you just feel constrained by the facts. You want to go where the words take you, and people's actual lives don't always conform. And you can't know them that well.

A lot of things you just stumble into: relationships or ways of putting characters opposite one another that really worked. So then it's not always so much about imitating other people, but imitating yourself, at least in your thinking.

I'm a novelist: I spend a great part of my day pretending to myself that I'm in a different world, being a different person, faced with decisions I pretend I haven't created.

When I read good stories, I want to write good stories too.

I'm a believer in using whatever works for fiction, but mostly, that's not life.

I'm not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who's sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It's not the way I work.

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.