“I don’t think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.”

—  P. D. James

Interview with Jake Kerridge, The Telegraph, 26 Sep 2009 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/6227400/PD-James-Queen-of-Detective-Fiction-Interview.html.
Other

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I don’t think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, …" by P. D. James?
P. D. James photo
P. D. James 26
English crime writer 1920–2014

Related quotes

Eiji Aonuma photo
China Miéville photo
Ariel Dorfman photo
Rick Riordan photo
Bob Kane photo
Chris Carmack photo

“When I’m creating music, I don’t have an agenda for a sound or a genre or a message, I just want it to be truthful and representative of the lyrical content that means something to me, and the music that I love.”

Chris Carmack (1980) American actor and model

‘Nashville’ Star Chris Carmack on Introspective New EP: Ram Report https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/nashville-star-chris-carmack-on-introspective-new-ep-ram-report-188637/ (December 11, 2015)

Carlos Fuentes photo

“Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.”

Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012) Mexican writer

"How I Started to Write", in Rick Simonson and Scott Walker (eds.) The Graywolf Annual Five: Multi-Cultural Literacy (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1988); cited from Myself With Others (London: Pan, 1989) p. 27.

Elizabeth Hand photo
Bill Withers photo
China Miéville photo

“I refute that—I think that those are inevitable components, but it’s the surrendering to the impossible, the weird, that characterizes genre.”

China Miéville (1972) English writer

Interview with Joan Gordon
Context: There’s simultaneously something rigorous and something playful in genre. It’s about the positing of something impossible—whether not-yet-possible or never-possible—and then taking that impossibility and granting it its own terms and systematicity. It’s carnivalesque in its impossibility and overturning of reality, but it’s rationalist in that it pretends it is real. And it’s that second element which I think those who dip their toes in the SF pond so often forget. They think sf is “about” analogies, and metaphors, and so on. I refute that—I think that those are inevitable components, but it’s the surrendering to the impossible, the weird, that characterizes genre. Those flirting with SF don’t surrender to it; they distance themselves from it, and have a neon sub-text saying, “It’s okay, this isn’t really about spaceships or aliens, it’s about real life,” not understanding that it can be both, and would do the latter better if it was serious about the former.

Related topics