Alvaro Enrigue Quotes

I just want to be told a story, and I want to believe I'm living that story, and I don't give a thought to influences or method or any other writerly concerns.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

I don't care whether the story is real or fantastical. I tell the story that needs to be told.

Quite casually I wander into my plot, poke around with my characters for a while, then amble off, leaving no moral proved and no reader improved.

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.

Writing is writing to me. I'm incapable of saying no to any writing job, so I've done everything - historical fiction, myths, fairy tales, anything that anybody expresses any interest in me writing, I'll write. It's the same reason I used to read as a child: I like going somewhere else and being someone else.

Whether it's fiction or nonfiction, writing takes me to another world.

I don't know what that line is between fiction and non-fiction that other people have in their minds, but to me, when I'm writing, it's just like whatever the next sentence should be is the next sentence. It's not this artificial division.

I think I do more fiction than autobiography.

I view myself as a fiction writer who just happens to write nonfiction. I think I look at the world through a fiction-writer's eyes.

I feel like my brain is more geared towards a novel than it is to a movie.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

I don't think I could write a straight drama.

When I give myself over to a good novel, I surrender to the truths fashioned from one writer's heart, mind and soul. I do not waste a nanosecond wondering whether what I'm reading 'really happened.'

Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.

All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.

Basically, I just write whatever story grabs me rather than considering the genre.

Sometimes I read a script and it's obvious from early on that it's one where the suspension of disbelief has to develop strongly from page one. Some are more reality-based.

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

I'm always saying that my books are not autobiographical because they're not. I can't choose any one scene and say, 'Oh, this is exactly what happened to me!' I just use little snippets of things as a starting point!

In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.

I love telling stories. I love the intimacy between the writer and reader. When you write sketches it's over in two minutes. When you write a book the characters have to have a bit of emotional depth.

In my books I try to tell a good story, not give messages.

Fiction will always be my greatest love, with poetry close behind.