Top 9 Quotes by Robert Olen Butler

Story is a yearning meeting an obstacle.

Story is a yearning meeting an obstacle.

Inspirational, Inspiring, Stories

All plot comes from the character's trying to get something, to achieve something, wanting, desiring, longing.

Character, Trying, Plot

Robert Olen Butler (2007). “From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction”, p.139, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And that's the hardest thing, because we want to flinch. The artist must go into the white hot center of himself, and our impulse when we get there is to look away and avert our eyes.

Robert Olen Butler

Mean, Eye, Artist

The ironic humor comes from the distance between what we understand about ourselves and what is truly going on in ourselves.

Robert Olen Butler

Distance, Ironic, Humour

We are the yearning creatures of this planet.

Robert Olen Butler

Planets, Yearning, Creatures

Robert Olen Butler, Janet Burroway (2006). “From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction”, p.40, Grove Press

The only craft and technique you have legitimate access to is the craft and technique you forgot, that has dissolved itself into the unconscious... Because you have learned it so well you have forgotten it.

Robert Olen Butler

Technique, Crafts, Forgotten

Natural writers will often try to force themselves into a form - novel, story, screenplay, or poem - that is not necessarily the appropriate form for the way they see the world... if, in fact, they are writing from the artist's impulse, which is a deep, inchoate vision of some sort of order behind the apparent chaos of life on planet earth, they'll be driven then to express that vision in the creation of the object - the art object.

Robert Olen Butler

Art, Writing, Order

In Red Flags, Juris Jurjevics has brilliantly accomplished a feat that is becoming a major characteristic of 21st century literature: the seamless combining of a genre form with the deep resonance of literary art. This book is thrilling to read for both its narrative drive and its insight into the human heart.

Robert Olen Butler

Art, Book, Red Flags