A Quote by Ottessa Moshfegh
Building a relationship with the character. It's just like sitting with someone you know. It's very easy to predict when they're going to shake their head or say whatever, but because I'm the author I have to make characters do what I want them to do.
Related Quotes
I've fully accepted the fact that if I'm going to do a career like this, I have to be willing to take criticism, because it's a part of the job, you know? Any Instagram thing I post, someone's going to say something. I know that. Anything on Twitter, someone's going to judge whatever I do, whatever I say, whatever I look like. I understand that.
I don't 'handle' people. It's so much easier to manipulate actors than to really have an earnest discussion with them. It's very easy to say whatever's going to appease them and then turn around and do whatever you want to do. It's difficult to be forthright with people, because the job does not lend itself to that.
I only know what it's like to be an author with social media. I can't compare. I do think we lose the mystery of the author. Today, I get tons of e-mails and Facebook messages from readers, and my goal with Twitter and Facebook is, if someone reaches out to me, I'm going to respond to them. I don't want to be an elitist author who is untouchable. I'm just a regular person, too. I will always respond to everybody.
And why do we reduce the beauty of relating to relationship? Why are we in such a hurry? - because to relate is insecure, and relationship is a security, relationship has a certainty. Relating is just a meeting of two strangers, maybe just an overnight stay and in the morning we say good-bye. Who knows what is going to happen tomorrow? And we are so afraid that we want to make it certain, we want to make it predictable. We would like tomorrow to be according to our ideas; we don't allow it freedom to have its own say. So we immediately reduce every verb to a noun.
When a woman extends her hand for you to shake it, then you shake her hand. You do not turn it up and kiss it. And it is just so creepy. Because, you know, I handed it at this angle. I handed it at the handshake angle and so I'm not giving it to you to do whatever you want with it. I'm not loaning it to you. It's like if somebody borrowed your lawnmower and you're assuming they're going to use it to mow their lawn. You don't want to find out later they put it in the ocean!
You want everyone to be a full character. No one is just evil, or very few people are, hopefully. They're characters, so you want to flush them out. You've got to show all sides of them. There is definitely an antagonistic relationship between guards and prisoners, and I do think it flares up.
I think people are a mixture of everything. I like desperate characters because they do things that most of us normally wouldn't do. If a character is a scoundrel or a liar you think you know them, but then I can bring some emotion to them and they become much fuller than you ever imagined. So what I try to do is have a story where you don't quite know where it's going, and characters who you don't quite know where they're going.
For whatever reason, Coach Schwartz and I weren't all that close at first. We didn't have that kind of relationship, really. I don't know why, maybe because I was a rookie, but I never felt real comfortable just popping my head in his office and sitting down to talk.
Going to a bar or pool hall doesn’t mean you’re a drunk, just like sitting in a henhouse doesn’t make you a chicken. It’s the same in the opposite setting. Sitting in a church building doesn’t make you a follower of Christ.
I never cake someone who doesn't want to be caked - at least, I try not to. Sometimes I miss my target. I'm pretty much going through the crowd making sure I find someone who wants to get caked. If you don't want to get caked, shake your head or tell me you don't want to get caked. It's that easy.
We're very proud of our business relationship, it's been very special for 20 years. Who can say that? It makes me shake my head sometimes driving to the rink, because I'm still excited to see Tessa at the arena for warmup.
People who are having a love-sex relationship are continuously lying to each other because the very nature of the relationship demands that they do, because you have to make a love object of this person, which means that you editorialize about them. You cut out what you don't want to see, you add this if it isn't there. And so therefore you're building a lie.
I can tell any liberal why he or she thinks what they think. I can predict to them what their reaction to any event or person is going to be, because I know them, because I have taken the time because I'm curious to study it. I know what liberalism is. I know from where it springs and derives, and I know the vast majority of people who are liberals, what they are going to do, say, and think about.
I just want to portray a very honest character that displays traits that people can truly relate to and can help them - the audience and myself because I learn from the characters as well - help them see themselves in a perspective that is outside of what they know already, and grow from that experience.
When you're building a character, or at least when I'm building a character, you start saying, 'How am I going to make people like him?'
Journeys become very good metaphors. They always have the character put into circumstances that reveal him. If I had based my characters in New York and had them just sitting and thinking about life, it would be like what contemporary U.S. fiction is about. That is very heavy, literally, for me. It doesn't become mainstream enough because the pages don't turn themselves.
Related Authors
Charles Bukowski Quotes
American
Novelist
Charles Dickens Quotes
English
Novelist
Chuck Palahniuk Quotes
American
Novelist
Ernest Hemingway Quotes
American
Novelist
George Eliot Quotes
British
Novelist
George Orwell Quotes
British
Novelist
George R. R. Martin Quotes
American
Novelist
Jane Austen Quotes
British
Novelist
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
German
Novelist
Margaret Atwood Quotes
Canadian
Novelist
Nicholas Sparks Quotes
American
Novelist
Paulo Coelho Quotes
Brazilian
Novelist
Sarah Dessen Quotes
American
Novelist
Stephenie Meyer Quotes
American
Novelist
Veronica Roth Quotes
American
Novelist
Victor Hugo Quotes
French
Novelist