“A good novelist does not lead his characters, he follows them. A good novelist does not create events, he watches them happen and then writes down what he sees.”

Source: Finders Keepers

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "A good novelist does not lead his characters, he follows them. A good novelist does not create events, he watches them …" by Stephen King?
Stephen King photo
Stephen King 733
American author 1947

Related quotes

P. D. James photo

“Every novelist write what he or she needs to write, a subconscious compulsion to express and explain his unique view of reality.”

P. D. James (1920–2014) English crime writer

Time to be Earnest - a Fragment of Biography Faber & Faber, London 1999.
Time to be Earnest - a Fragment of Biography

Philip K. Dick photo
William Faulkner photo
Horace Bushnell photo
John Dos Passos photo

“There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel - bound to.”

John Dos Passos (1896–1970) novelist, playwright, poet, journalist, painter

"An Interview with Mr. John Dos Passos," New York Times, Nov 23 1941

Jean de La Bruyère photo

“That man is good who does good to others; if he suffers on account of the good he does, he is very good”

Aphorism 44
Les Caractères (1688), Du mérite personnel
Context: That man is good who does good to others; if he suffers on account of the good he does, he is very good; if he suffers at the hands of those to whom he has done good, then his goodness is so great that it could be enhanced only by greater sufferings; and if he should die at their hands, his virtue can go no further: it is heroic, it is perfect.

John Dos Passos photo

“The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history.”

John Dos Passos (1896–1970) novelist, playwright, poet, journalist, painter

"The Business of a Novelist," review of William Rollins's The Shadow Before, 1934

J. M. Barrie photo
Michael Moorcock photo

Related topics