Quote

I can't be reading novels when I'm writing a novel, because somebody's voice creeps in. The hardest thing to do is keep the tone and your attitude over the course of a year or however long it takes.But when I'm writing short stories, which I will be doing shortly, I can read anything I like.

T.C. Boyle

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

T.C. Boyle
Stories
Takes
Novels
Anything
Courses
Tone
Writing
Course
Hardest
Thing
Year
However
Long
Reading
Short
Years
Read
Novel
Like
Voice
Attitude
Shortly
Keep
Somebody
Creeps

More quotes by T.C. Boyle

Image
The reason we love nature is because it's fascinating and we love all the creatures, but if you watch any nature film, there's always a lesson: the creatures are all dying and life sucks. The same is true of literature.
T.C. Boyle
Image
If I'm doing my job correctly, I'm presenting a scenario for you as the reader to engage with on your own. I mean that's what the best art is supposed to do.
T.C. Boyle
Image
I'm pretty hardcore. I stick exactly to what I'm doing. So I write a novel in one period, and then I'll write stories in another period. I only work on one thing at once, because I'm afraid that I wouldn't finish what I'd started.
T.C. Boyle
Image
From my point of view, why shouldn't I work in every possible mode, to see if it's viable? Los Gigantes would not have worked as a straightforward, naturalistic tale. Part of the fun of it is that it's so preposterous and yet at the same time, it could have happened. Think of eugenics. Hitler certainly would have been doing it if he could have
T.C. Boyle
Image
The hardest thing in a novel is time. You've got [a line like] two weeks later, he woke up with a headache, and you've got to add up that entire two weeks and what the date is and whether it works. That kind of stuff drives me crazy and if I don't have it exactly right, I can't move forward because I don't feel confident.
T.C. Boyle
Image
In order to create you have to believe in your ability to do so and that often means excluding whole chunks of normal life, and, of course, pumping yourself up as much as possible as a way of keeping on. Sort of cheering for yourself in the great football stadium of life. (Barnes & Noble Review, email dialogue with Cameron Martin, Feb. 09, 2009
T.C. Boyle
Image
I've always been a huge fan of theatre and performance. The idea of just the human voice and just this night. Live music is the same. They're doing it for you right now. It's an amazing thing. And if you perform a story properly, it can be a transporting, too.
T.C. Boyle
Image
You're not getting the joy out of literature that it gave you. This is the danger of what we do. Look at Hemingway and so many others. You devote your life to one thing, that is what you are. It's artificial but it's all you have. If you lose it, then you're nothing and there's no point in going on.
T.C. Boyle
Image
Music is, by far, the best art. Nothing even comes close. It's so immediate and emotional. In writing, maybe ninety percent of it is the unconscious and ten percent is control. In music, I think it's probably more like ninety-nine percent the unconscious. It's just a beautiful thing happening through you. And so, too, is writing a great story.
T.C. Boyle
Image
But then, that's the beauty of writing stories-each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there's no feeling like it.
T.C. Boyle
Image
All writers are egomaniacal, manic-depressive, drug-addicted alcoholics. You want to have that fix again.
T.C. Boyle
Image
A richly detailed, poignant, and utterly fascinating look into another culture and how it is cross-pollinated by our own. It brings to mind the work of Ha Jin in its power and revelation of the new.
T.C. Boyle
Image
The hardest part is always the middle of anything because at that point, on some unconscious level, you have to figure out what it's about and why you're doing it and what it means. You don't know that in the beginning.
T.C. Boyle
Image
At best, I consider flying an unavoidable necessity, a time to resurrect forgotten prayers and contemplate the end of all joy in a twisted howling heap of machinery at worst, I rank it right up there with psychotic episodes and torture at the hands of malevolent strangers.
T.C. Boyle
Image
I'm always trying to do something different and trying to keep myself amused.
T.C. Boyle
Image
Nothing moves around, it just goes straight from the start to the end. The final draft on the final day, that's it, same for the novels. What I turn in is what you see. There are some exceptions, but almost always I can see exactly what it's going to be.
T.C. Boyle
Image
I'm sad that there no more mysterious places in the world.
T.C. Boyle
Image
I always dread the process of writing because I'm not a writer. I'm an audible guy, I'm a verbal guy. I love to talk. I write a book every couple years, but it just takes everything out of me to get a book out.
T.C. Boyle
Image
I was joking earlier when I said that all writers are manic depressives, but it's a joke with a lot of truth behind it. For fiction writers and poets, too, there's something wrong with you and you do this art as a way of correcting it or addressing it in some way.
T.C. Boyle
Image
Alcohol had a lot to do with it, too, and mental instability. All writers are narcissistic, manic-depressive drug addicts and alcoholics, and I am no exception.
T.C. Boyle