Authorial Perspective Quotes

I've written short stories from male perspectives before, and I've never had a problem with it as long as I've understood the character's emotions and motivations.

The comic novels I did when I was in my 20s had a harder edge - less sympathy for people. Or a sympathy that was harder to detect: Characters' foibles and obsessive bents were unrelenting, like caricatures.

A lot of folks just get it in their head that, for instance, like writing memoirs is just easy. You just write down what happened. It doesn't quite work that way.

Yes, one uses what one knows, but autobiography means something else. I should never be able to write a real autobiography; I always end by falsifying and fictionalizing—I’m a liar, in fact. That means I’m a novelist, after all. I write about what I know.

But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?

The power of reading a great book is that you start thinking like the author. For those magical moments while you are immersed in the forests of Arden, you are William Shakespeare; while you are shipwrecked on Treasure Island, you are Robert Louis Stevenson; while you are communing with nature at Walden, you are Henry David Thoreau. You start to think like they think, feel like they feel, and use imagination as they would. Their references become your own, and you carry these with you long after you've turned the last page.

Hunter S. Thompson and I are old friends, but what we do is so different. There are surface similarities that really have to do with us being frustrated poets.

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: 'My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasn't oo, squeezums?

From the writer's point of view, critics should be ignored, although it's hard not to do what they suggest. I think it's unfortunate to have critics for friends. Suppose you write something that stinks, what are they going to say in a review? Say it stinks? So if they're honest, they do, and if you were friends you're still friends, but the knowledge of your lousy writing and their articulate admission of it will be always something between the two of you, like the knowledge between a man and his wife of some shady adultery.

When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.

I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.

I don't know enough about the lower classes to write about them. I don't feel with them, and that could be regarded as a defect, a limitation of my imagination. I could put myself in their position, but not politically. The idea of writing a story or a book about somebody completely devoid of appreciation of anything I care about is completely foreign to me.

All writers write about themselves, just as the old storytellers chose to tell stories that spoke to and about themselves. They call it the world, but it is themselves they portray. The world of which they write is like a mirror that reflects the inside of their hearts, often more truly than they know.

I try not to identify too strongly with any of my characters. I like to stand back and see them objectively. I think this is why I often use boys instead of girls, just in case I get too close and lose the overall picture.

Some writing courses will advise you to write what you know. I've always thought this is very odd advice ... because it means, for example, that I should not be writing about Nicholas Flamel, because I didn't live in France in the 15th Century, I was not an alchemyst, am not immortal (despite the rumours) and do not know magic.

I'm a feminist. The women in my books in recent years have been powerful characters and I love to see a woman with a cute bottom walking past.

A writer will not keep quiet. He will express his opinion through writings.

When I read Dickens for the first time, I thought he was Jewish, because he wrote about oppression and bigotry, all the things that my father talked about.

Should you create a protagonist based directly on yourself? The problem with this - and it is a very large problem - is that almost no one can view himself objectively on the page. As the writer, you're too close to your own complicated makeup.

Well, for one, I don't judge my characters.

Political stuff is all about his [Hunter S. Thompson] reaction to a situation. And my stuff is much more externally driven.

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

To write history one must be more than a man, since the author who holds the pen of this great justiciary must be free from all preoccupation of interest or vanity.

When Truman Capote wrote from the perspective of condemned murderers from a lower economic class than his own, he had some gall. But writing fiction takes gall.