Author's Craft Quotes

Novelists have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale’s department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.

Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.

Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.

I have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest of the story. Technique can't operate at all, of course, except on believable material.

In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.

If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write.

I love great writing.

The 250-page outline for American Tabloid. The books are so dense. They're so complex, you cannot write like I write off the top of your head. It's the combination of that meticulousness and the power of the prose and, I think, the depth of the characterizations and the risks that I've taken with language that give the books their clout. And that's where I get pissed off at a lot of my younger readers.

Writing is storytelling. No matter how you slice it, you're saying, 'Once upon a time.' That's what writing is all about.

Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.

Writing a novel that works is an extremely difficult thing to do. It requires a level of skill and dedication that always surprises me.

You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.

I save the best of myself for novels, and I believe it shows.

In the biographical novel, there's only one person involved. I, the author, spend two to five years becoming the main character. I do that so by the time you get to the bottom of Page 2 or 3, you forget your name, where you live, your profession and the year it is. You become the main character of the book. You live the book.

There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.

I remember when I was a kid, I loved Sherlock Holmes. I thought Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the greatest writers, because I felt I knew Sherlock Holmes. He existed to me. When I went to England the first thing I did was go to Baker Street to look for his house. I think you've got to try to make all of your characters as empathetic and realistic as possible.

Writing books isn't a drastic departure from writing for the stage.

There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.

If you get the characters right you've done sometimes nearly half the work. I sometimes find I get the characters right then the characters will often help me write the book - not what they look like that's not very important - what people look like is not about their character. You have to describe the shape they leave in the world, how they react to things, what effect they have on people and you do that by telling their story.

The story line of my novel [The Kite Runner] is largely fictional. The characters were invented and the plot imagined.

You can have faith in writing itself. That's where to place your faith, in the same way that a pole vaulter places his faith in the laws of physics. He will go up in direct proportion to the strength with which he pushed off, and he will come down every time.

The most important sentence in a good book is the first one; it will contain the organic seed from which all that follows will grow.

To ask a novelist to talk about his novels is like asking somebody to cook about their dancing.

A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.