A Quote by Susan Howatch

Basically, all novelists should want to tell a story, and if they don't want to, they shouldn't be novelists. I think story-telling is important and underrated.

Susan Howatch

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Basically Important Novelists Should Story Tell Telling Think Underrated Want

Quote Author

Susan Howatch
English - Author
Born: July 14, 1940

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

Edmond de Goncourt

So often with beginning writers, the story that they want to start with is the most important story of their life - my molestation, my this, my horrible drug addiction - they want to tell that most important story, and they don't have the skills to tell it yet, so it ends up becoming a comedy. A powerful story told poorly becomes funny, it just makes people laugh behind their hands.

Chuck Palahniuk

I think that people have to have a story. When you tell a story, most people are not good storytellers because they think it's about them. You have to make your story, whatever story it is you're telling, their story. So you have to get good at telling a story so they can identify themselves in your story.

Larry Winget

You want to do movies that you are proud of - telling a story that you want to tell, not a story that you are forced to. Of course, as an actor, there are some things that you do that you try to forget about, but that's part of the job.

Joel Basman

Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.

James Gleick

I really think more fledgling novelists - and many current and even established novelists - should get out into the real world and cover local politics, sports, culture, and crime and write it up on deadline.

C. J. Box

I think the most important thing when you're telling a story is to just tell the story as best as you possibly can.

Andrea Riseborough

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.... Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.... Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.

Ursula K. Le Guin

I have to write the story I want to write. I never wrote them with a focus group of 8-year-olds in mind. I have to continue telling the story the way I want to tell it.

J. K. Rowling

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

Quentin Tarantino

I think that when I'm telling a story, I'm doing the best I can to tell the story as fully as I can, and if there are various fractures that happen in the story, then that's just the very thing that the story is as opposed to my looking for avenues of difference in one story. They just really do exist. For me, anyway.

Hilton Als

If I'm telling an L.A. story, I want to tell a fresh L.A. story and show places that haven't been shown before.

Sean Baker

If you want somebody to tell you a story, one of the most easiest and effective ways is if you're telling them a story.

Ira Glass

If it's commercial fiction that you want to write, it's story, story, story. You've got to get a story where if you tell it to somebody in a paragraph, they'll go, "Tell me more." And then when you start to write it, they continue to want to read more. And if you don't, it won't work.

James Patterson

Memoirists, unlike fiction writers, do not really want to 'tell a story.' They want to tell it all - the all of personal experience, of consciousness itself. That includes a story, but also the whole expanding universe of sensation and thought ... Memoirists wish to tell their mind. Not their story.