Matt Haig Quotes

The written word is the basic of everything. Most important, the idea, and after that, the dialogue. You can rehash the dialogue as you go along, it 's disgraceful to have to do this, but now and again you have no choice.

I enjoy both TV writing and novel writing, and they are very similar. The goal is to entertain and amuse the audience, and I subscribe to this P.G. Wodehouse piece of advice: "Try to give pleasure with every sentence."

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Also, they don't understand - writing is language. The use of language. The language to create image, the language to create drama. It requires a skill of learning how to use language.

I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel.

To write you have to be able to know how to put words together.

I write. This is what I do. My job is to sit down with my vocabulary, select words, and decide what order they should be placed in an attempt to keep someone's attention and perhaps provide them with a laugh or two along the way.

I'm a novelist first, and I wrote a bunch of books, and everything I write, I just find people are more interesting when there's an element of humor to it.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.'

I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.

I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

The short story seems like the best of all possible worlds. I do feel it is closer to writing poetry than to writing a novel, with its requirements of concentration and economy.

Writing is not like acting, where you can pull these little stunts that create a particular effect. Words are all it is about, and the way you use words has to be individual and particular to you.

That's always the most productive research - research into tone, into voice. Facts are nice, too, but facts are more raw material than creative inspiration.

It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, John Updike... Eudora Welty - that I became excited about the possibilities of writing.

Personally, I love books, and I am interested in the notion that stories are told better in different media depending on the story.

Prose is admittedly an art rooted in social intercourse, and a fiction writer is faster to find a common denominator with his cell mates than a poet is.

My books aren't autobiographical.

I never took creative writing.

I have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest of the story. Technique can't operate at all, of course, except on believable material.

Fill your pages with details. Work hard to get the right word.

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.