Local Color Quotes

I don't think I could set a book in a place without knowing it really well.

This is unexposed film of Greenwich Village because nothing ever happens there.

If you using local color in an unobtrusive way, it is all for the good. But if you stress it, the whole thing is artificial. But it should be used, I mean, it's not forbidden. But you don't have to stress it.

I have an image of Shanghai, which is quite different from other directors, I think. The story of Shanghai should happen in back alleys.

A sense of place is very important in writing.

In fiction, too, after the death of Cooper the main tendency for nearly a generation was away from the conquest of new borders to the closer cultivation, east of the Mississippi, of ground already marked.

If my characters travel somewhere, I generally write about a place I know to give the scenes more authenticity.

I like the fact that I'm from the South and that I have this rich history behind me. I come from a family of storytellers. They can't just tell you how someone went to the store. They have to tell you who they saw, what they were wearing, what they said, what they had in their grocery cart.

I don't like to be described as a Southern writer. The danger is, if you're described as a Southern writer, you might be thought of as someone who writes about a picturesque local scene like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone With the Wind, something like that.

A hack writer who would have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tried out a few of the old proven 'sure-fire' literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.

You want to hear an agent scream, say, 'I'm thinking about doing a collection of short stories set in the Ozarks.'

Most of my books are set in the American Midwest, where I have always lived. Midwesterners are lovely, down-to-earth people. The luxury of choosing this region as a setting is the endless supply of seasonal change images that accompany it; in addition to, the wide variety of settings, urban and rural, to choose from.

There's such an odd, eclectic group of people that make up the town of Plymouth, New Hampshire. I don't think I could avoid not coming out of there with a pretty good sense of humor.

To me, the contemporary novel suffers from a lack of sense of place - or spirit of place, if you will. It's not important to most writers, I must assume, or they try to research a given background on sabbatical. Not for me. I write about places I've lived long before I ever set pen to paper.

I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.

I think it's really useful to create parameters. The term you use can be forwarded into something more like a grid, a rubric, a system that you apply to all environments, and in so doing you create a situation in which you can locate local color, local differences within new environments.

I was 12 when I ordered my first guitar out of the worn and discolored pages of the Sears and Roebuck catalog. The story that I bought it on the installment plan is untrue, the invention of a Hollywood press agent. Local color. I paid cash, $8, money I had saved as a hired hand on my uncle Calvin's farm, baling and stacking hay. Prairie hay, used as feed for the cattle in winter. It was mean work for a wiry boy, but ambition made me strong.

I love writing about Oklahoma. I love writing Oklahoma characters; I love playing Southwestern characters.

Southerners have this love of embellishment. Even when you read a police report, there's some backstory.