Emma Healey Quotes

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

Writing fiction is an act of imaginative empathy.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.

The lovely thing about writing is, well, two things. One, writing fiction allows us to bring an order to our lives that doesn't exist in real life. And two, it allows us to create human characters that we know better than we will ever know anyone in real life.

Novels can be a snapshot of a moment in time, or several moments in time, and as a reader, that's what I really like, and as a writer, it's what I'm drawn to also.

In my own writing, I think of myself as a realist who exaggerates a little.

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

I've loved sci-fi and speculative fiction since I was a kid. It was inevitable I'd try my hand at it at some point.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

Playing with different genres and perspectives and ways of telling stories is one of the perks of being a novelist, but at the same time, I want precision. And in order to be precise about stuff, you have to get personal. Symbolism is very boring.

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 novel wouldn't be a book if there weren't some flights of fancy on the part of the author, stopping time to examine things, or to tell a joke.

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

I like going back and writing fiction.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

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

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.

I don't assume, because I can write screenplays, that I know how to write a novel. It's a very different world. There's a craft involved in storytelling, and it's a different kind of craft. But yes, someday I will do that. It just might be awhile.