Nigel Kneale Quotes

The trick is the paradox - turning your story inside out. Now if it is something that appears to be of total normality and then suddenly turns inside out and is a different thing all together then that's fun to write.

My writing has always been what you call 'narrative fiction' in the sense that it's got very strong plots and twists at the end.

I have an idea, and I have a perpetrator, and I write the book along those lines, and when I get to the last chapter, I change the perpetrator so that if I can deceive myself, I can deceive the reader.

For me, the worst writing generally just 'flips' things: this person's really a traitor; it was all a dream; etc. Nothing is so ruinous as a forced 'twist,' I think.

I didn't make 'The Sixth Sense' because I thought the ending wouldn't work!

If you like a story that's totally different and won't know which way it's going... where it's go ing to end up and which way it's going to take you, then I think my work fits the bill.

I like a book better if I can't predict what's going to happen.

When I sit down to write a scene, I have a plan in mind, and I'm thrilled when a character disregards my goals and takes the story to a place I hadn't imagined.

I find most 'rules' about how to write a 'good story' confining, and I enjoy writing stories that don't look like stories at all on the surface.

As a child, my mother told me lots of fairy stories, many her own invention. She, too, tended to reverse the norm.

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

One of the things I love, and I'm a voracious reader as well as a writer, is books that surprise me, that are not predictable.

My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.

I was always determined that one way or another I would force a book on the world, even if I had to resort to writing one about a tabby cat who solves mysteries.

Then there was Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote for Weird Tales and who had a wild imagination. He wasn't a very talented writer, but his imagination was wonderful.

Part of George R.R. Martin's brilliant storytelling is taking the carpet out from under your feet.

Create a world in which these things do or do not exist, or in which they are extended in some way. Test reality against this fiction. The reader will recognize the world that you're talking about, even though it may be another one altogether.

'The One-Eyed Man' is a novel that was one I never intended to write.

I've always been inspired by Genet, Henry Miller and Hubert Selby, Jr., who taught me that you've got to tell a bigger truth in whatever you're doing, but the truth is not popular.

A good ground rule for writing in any genre is, start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself. Ask what it's afraid of, what it's trying to hide - then write that.

I've said in many interviews that I like my fiction to be unpredictable. I like there to be considerable suspense.

It's not so much that I got that idea at some point, it came up naturally because of the improvisational nature of the story I was telling.

A great literary work can be completely, completely unpredictable. Which can sometimes make them very hard to read, but it gives them a great originality.

My writing has a lot of surprising twists.

Sometimes, by using the most over-the-top, ridiculous plot device you can imagine, you get some interesting little conflicts and cool things that you might not otherwise have a chance to explore.