Novels usually evolve out of ‘character.’ Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.
My writing is often a way of ‘bearing witness’ for others who lack the education and the opportunity to tell their own stories, so I hope that my writing won’t be affected too much by my personal life.
Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments.
I could never have a mistress, because I couldn’t bear to tell the story of my life all over again.
I had forgotten that, and so many things. How could I put everything down on paper? It seemed impossible. No matter what, the majority of life would be left out of this story, this sliver of a version of the life I’d known. But I tried anyway.
Every story we remember is a novel. Novels make things more universal.
The weird thing is that working within an established story was actually kind of liberating. You know the beginning and middle and end, more or less, so there’s less pressure to figure all that out.
When anybody starts out with a memoir, you get the impulse to tell your own story with your own voice, and you get all that out in one fell swoop sometimes.
To me any given story has its appropriate form. There might be some story I get involved with that’s begging to be a graphic novel, so that will have to be that way.
Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.
The story is not in the words; it’s in the struggle.
The truth of the story lies in the details.
But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.
As long as there’s one person to believe it, there’s no story that can’t be true.
The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.
We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.
Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.
I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn’t think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.
Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.
Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it.