Sean Durkin Quotes

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'.

The novel space is a pure space. I'm nobody once I go into that room. I'm not gay, I'm not bald, I'm not Irish. I'm not anybody. I'm nobody. I'm the guy telling the story, and the only person that matters is the person reading that story, the target. It's to get that person to feel what I'm trying to dramatize.

I don't have a great eye for detail. I leave blanks in all of my stories. I leave out all detail, which leaves the reader to fill in something better.

I often use nameless places in my work as a way of allowing the readers to create more of the novel and to make it potentially about their experiences, what they know, a city that they have perhaps seen on television.

I like writing about places, about people and environments. When I create a world, it lets me go in and define the details of that world.

I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around.

I very seldom, very seldom, even know what my characters look like.

If one day a TV series comes into my head, and that is what I want to write, I'll write it. It just depends what story is in my brain at the time.

I'd be lying if I said that any part of writing is easy for me, but I have always found that setting comes more naturally to me than, say, writing action scenes.

I'm not in the business of meddling with people's destinies - and yes, my characters are real people to me. They have histories and thoughts and yearnings and hurts and misgivings and pleasures that don't belong to me.

Jerry picked up the technique of visualizing the story as a movie scenario; and whenever he gave me a script, I would see it as a screenplay. That was the technique that Jerry used, and I just picked it up.

I certainly knew from an early age... how to tell stories; how to create pictures in other people's heads.

A script can just be a blueprint, and you've got to go in and build it and color it in and paint it.

The things that I'm interested in directing are fiction, because then you're not married to a particular reality.

I purposely adopted a style in my storytelling wherein I don't have to explain everything or why the story is moving in a particular way.

The more ways you can tell a story and paint a picture, the better it is.

I'm the sort of writer who likes to leave doors open for readers.

There are things you can say in the voice of a fictional character that you could not explore any other way.

The good thing about directing a screenplay that you've written is that you see the film in your head as you're writing it and then you see those decisions through to the end.

A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.

I'd rather let the fiction speak for itself and I don't want to write fiction that tells people how to feel, and I don't want to be judgmental in the fiction.

I do like to wrap things up and leave some things to the readers' imagination.

I find that the only way to make my characters really interesting to children is to exaggerate all their good or bad qualities, and so if a person is nasty or bad or cruel, you make them very nasty, very bad, very cruel. If they are ugly, you make them extremely ugly. That, I think, is fun and makes an impact.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.