Marley Dias Quotes

My readers often tell me that what they admire about my books is my ability to write from so many points of view. My challenge to myself is whether I'll ever be able to write a novel just from one point of view. It seems impossible.

Do the story in the way it really demands to be done, which may mean using several different styles or only one style; but it's still about respecting the story.

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

I write as well as I can. I'm a journalist at heart, so it's the story that matters.

When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.

What's great about 'Game of Thrones' is they change the perspective, the POV, all the time. So you will have one story told by one character and you'll go, 'Oh my God, horrible', and then maybe the season after you have the same story told but from the person you thought was just the most horrible, vile creature.

As far as what I do, my value as a writer is certainly not to try to recapitulate a 19th century form. Certain styles of narrative don't conform to my style of experiencing the world.

When I'm writing, I don't really have much other guide than, 'As a reader, how would I respond to this?'

I changed my writing style deliberately. My first two novels were written in a very self-consciously literary way. After I embraced gay subject matter, which was then new, I didn't want to stand in its way. I wanted to make the style as transparent as possible so I could get on with it and tell the story, which was inherently interesting.

Sometimes, in certain stories, I think we know at the outset essentially what the tone is going to be, or it becomes important that we're groping toward some kind of story with a certain kind of tone that we both get somehow. But I don't think how that's combined with other elements is ever in any way overtly discussed.

I find the world just too complex to embrace a single ideological point of view.

I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.

The great thing about writing is that it has to work without that invisible layer of the reader's added knowledge.

I learned to write from different points of view and not just something I would say.

When podcasts are in charge there will be no wars, just ears. That will probably be our motto, but in Latin. In our podcastian future, we'll comprehend that each story has another angle, every case a contradictory piece of evidence.

I think sometimes a part requires more than one approach or thought.

I think that when memoir goes wrong, it goes wrong from too much memory, too much detail. It's about clearing all that away and just getting to the story.

I rather envy writers who do variations on a theme. I like reading those books, but in practice, I can't do it.

Whatever the case, oftentimes, for a story to feel complete to me, I need more than one point of view.

Great novels have great characterization no matter what. But multiple points of view let me examine characters from entirely different perspectives, allowing me to learn more about everyone in the process.

The purpose of a good education is to show you that there are three sides to a two-sided story.

I'm not sure that all books aren't that way. I think that might apply to any book I was writing. The book was kind of the product of this enormous infatuation I had, not only with the office and office politics, but with perspective, and trying to tell a story from as wide a range of perspectives as you possibly can. I tried to capture it all with the first-person plural, but once I settled on that, I used it to tell the story from as many angles as I could. I guess, to put it romantically, it was about a love affair with the craft of perspective.

Confidence comes from seeing so many sides, angles, views, and tangents. Because when you do select an approach or direction, you are doing so with better/ more complete information.

Like stories, people have individual lives, and are all caught up in this murky thing. All of them have the best intentions. In that sense, you could just as easily tell the same story from another character's perspective. Maybe that's a good idea for a TV series.

To 'see both sides' of a problem is the surest way to prevent its complete solution. Because there are always more than two sides.