Authorial Distance Quotes

For me, there's a fine line between telling a story that's fictional with lots of details and then removing yourself too much from it, so it's bloodless, a little too fictional.

That balance between involvement and detachment is what novelists do. It's the ideal relationship between a novelist and a character, I think, total involvement and identity and empathy, stopping short of being autobiographical - in my case, anyway - but also quite detached.

Sometimes my characters are not myself.

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.

When I write fiction, I create characters whose views are not my own, and I allow them to be eloquent in defense of their, not my, views.

Everything I write doesn't appear to be biography until later. I often say that I've never written about anything I've experienced. Of course, that's not true. But it doesn't appear familiar to me at all. And maybe that's because I have to be in a kind of coma in order to write. If it appeared familiar, I wouldn't.

I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been writing them.

I know that in a poem, even when the speaker is speaking from the poet's experience, there's always something that's borrowed, some authority that sits outside of the poet that the poem has claimed. There's a dramatic pitch that makes the speaker capable of saying something more courageous or stranger or simply other than what the poet would be able to say.

I try not to push characters too close to myself because they get harder to write, but as a writer, you try to find odd little personal experiences that you hope are universal or think might be universal.

I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.

You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.

A writer has to stand outside the page. It's not for the writer to shed tears onto the pages for these characters. It's not for him to suffer or to laugh or to experience ecstasy or agony in the manner of the characters on the pages.

A novelist's lack of awareness of and critical distance to his own body of work is due to a phenomenon that I have noticed in myself and many others: as soon as it is written, every new book erases the last one, leaving me with the impression that I have forgotten it.

I need a distance to my characters when I write.

I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider.

I admire writers who can remain objective and distanced, but that doesn't seem to be in my toolbox, somehow.