vivid portrayal Quotes

Often while reading a book one feels that the author wouold heave preferred to paint rather than to wirte; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

To hold the reader's attention, you have to bring the person who's reading the book inside the experience of the time: What was it like to have been alive then? What were these people like as human beings?

'Up the Junction' really made me understand the power of cinema to create a vivid sense of a community. When I went on to make 'Bhaji on the Beach,' it was this sense I tried to recreate.

What the artist must render is a living moment somehow, a living moment actually in action or an inward experience.

To choose the ideal voice for a character is to give a character an ardent and vivid life, to allow him or her to speak, rather than speaking for them, in an older style of omniscient narration.

I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

Great lecturers seldom hesitate to use dramatic tricks to enshrine their precepts in the minds of their audiences, and at Yale perhaps Chauncey B. Tinker was the most noted. To read one of his lectures was like reading a monologue of the great actress Ruth Draper--you missed the main point. You missed the drop in his voice as he approached the death in Rome of the tubercular Keats; you missed the shaking tone in which he described the poet's agony for the absent Fanny with him his love had never been consummated; you missed the grim silence of the end.

You see I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across, not just to depict life, or criticize it, but to actually make it alive.

If a novel reveals true and vivid relationships, it is a moral work, no matter what the relationships consist in. If the novelisthonours the relationship in itself, it will be a great novel.

I reenact everything. I love to paint a picture for my audience. I'm a lot like Richard Pryor in that aspect. I do a lot of acting on stage, acting out and visualizing stuff. I love to do that. I'm into it so much, it just comes out of me.

Even though one of them is about an Edinburgh junkie and ones a little boy of eight in Manchester, you want them to always portray their world in such a vivid way that the audience can disappear inside the story.

I can't remember a picture that has expressed black attitudes and personal relationships as vividly as we've done in 'Cadence.'

I think that one wants from a painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can't avoid saying.

How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive?

Eloquence is a painting of thought; and thus those who, after having painted it, add something more, make a picture instead of a portrait.

I have a studio in the country - in the woods - but my paintings look more real to me than what is outdoors. You walk outside; the rocks are inert; even the clouds are inert. It makes me feel a little better. But I do have a faith that it is possible to make a living thing, not a diagram of what I have been thinking: to posit with paint something living, something that changes each day.

My life is an open book. With illustrations.

The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.