Experience has shown me that standing by oneself reading from one's book isn't especially compelling - unless you're David Sedaris.
What's great about good writing is that it feels like life, so it's not hard to relate to her circumstances.
Every writer dreams of writing a book that will touch people.
I was a huge 'Breaking Bad' fan. I just loved the whole thing. Always interesting, always urgent. The stakes were always high.
Works of imagination excel by their allurement and delight; by their power of attracting and detaining the attention. That book is good in vain which the reader throws away. He only is the master who keeps the mind in pleasing captivity; whose pages are perused with eagerness, and in hope of new pleasure are perused again; and whose conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow, such as the traveller casts upon departing day.
If you laughed earlier in the poem, and I bring you close to tears in the end, that's the best.
Bill Gallagher's new version of 'The Prisoner' is an enthralling commentary on modern culture. It is witty, intelligent and disturbing. I am very excited to be involved.
There are people out there who will not read books, but somehow they'll read my books.
Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.
You might not have the biggest budget or resources or cast, but if you have a great story, people will latch onto it.
A lot of times, you finish a movie, and you're either going, 'Oh, thank God, that's over,' or 'Oh, my God, it's over, and I don't want it to end.'
Good story' means something worth telling that the world wants to hear. Finding this is your lonely task...But the love of a good story, of terrific characters and a world driven by your passion, courage, and creative gifts is still not enough. Your goal must be a good story well told.
The things I like to find in a story are punch and poetry.
Throat clutching from the outset! The Never List stands as a sterling example of psychological thriller writing at its best. Cancel appointments and give up on sleep. It's that kind of book.
With the audience I write for, I want to make sure that the reader is eagerly turning every page. I want each of my books to be an absorbing reading experience, an authentic piece of literature. The worst thing that can happen is for a book to have a chilling effect on the reader, to have a kid pick it up and look at a bunch of footnotes and think, No, I'm not going to read this, it's too intimidating.
As I see it, a successful story of any kind should be almost like hypnosis: You fascinate the reader with your first sentence, draw them in further with your second sentence and have them in a mild trance by the third. Then, being careful not to wake them, you carry them away up the back alley of your narrative and when they are hopelessly lost within the story, having surrendered themselves to it, you do them terrible violence with a softball bag and then lead them whimpering to the exit on the last page. Believe me, they'll thank you for it.
I want what I write to be deeply engaging and strange and true.
I cannot recall a more engaging passage in fiction, and I've been trying for almost eighteen seconds.
I love piecing together intricate thoughts that people find compulsively readable and they can't put down.
The telling of a good story, especially one that is real and true, is always exciting.
Breathtakingly real and utterly compelling, Immoral dishes up page-turning psychological suspense while treating us lucky readers to some of the most literate and stylish writing you'll find anywhere today.
You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full of fire - that contains a novel so vast and great and penetrating and bright and dark that it will put all other novels ever written to shame. And then, as you get towards the end, you begin to realise, no, it's just this book.
Breezy, sophisticated, hilarious, rude and aching with sweetness: LOVE, NINA might be the most charming book I've ever read.
A performance can have amazing visuals and special effects, but it has to tell a good story, even if that story isn't original.
What challenges me is this - I want to walk out of a film with the experience of having done a film, not with a feeling that I have sleepwalked through it.
