Authorial Bias Quotes

Real people are complex, contradictory, and have their own motivations - they can't just be mouthpieces for the writers' point of view.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

It's like my characters, all my men are Dad and me in a mess; all my female characters are smart and hopeful, like Mom just trying to make the best of things.

I'm quite sure Shakespeare enjoyed writing Iago much more than he did writing Othello. If you write about someone you love, what the hell are you supposed to say about that person? It's much better to have something between you and your main character that grates.

Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

I just feel that if I'm English and writing about an American president, I have got to have someone on my side who can help me out when I'm lapsing into lazy or obvious European skepticism.

People think that because I write about India I must be trying to portray India in a way.

Tennessee Williams knew about the South, but he would clean it up and lie about it.

I've found in the past that the more closely I identify with the heroine, the less completely she emerges as a person. So from the first novel I've been learning techniques to distance myself from the characters so that they are not me and I don't try to protect them in ways that aren't good for the story.

The way you speak of the characters in your story shows what you think of the values of conservatives‚ or evolution, for example. It shows where your moral center is. So you are in the message business whether you like it or not.

When writing, I model all the heroes after myself. Of course, it's hard to make them quite as wonderful as I am, but I come as close as I can.

I felt no need to write a German-bashing play.

You can't judge your characters or otherwise; it's not about you, it's about them.

As I point out in the very first pages of 'Into the Wild,' I approached this book not as a normal, you know, unbiased journalist.

I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority.

In general-like not just in fiction but in life-it doesn't work out well when someone imagines someone else as a manic pixie dream girl or an Edward Cullen or anything other than a full, complex human being. That said, while I've tried to reflect that in my books, I don't think I've always succeeded, because I am always running up against my own insufficiencies and biases etc.

The legacy of the fairy story in my brain is that everything will work out. In fiction it would be very hard for me, as a writer, to give a bad ending to a good character, or give a good ending to a bad character. That's probably not a very postmodern thing to say.