DAVE MORRIS

When I mention that I'm a game designer as well as a writer, someone will nod and say, 'Ah, that's what we like about your script. The videogame feel.'

Some have said that 'Frankenstein' is a story of a bad parenting giving rise to a troubled child.

Have confidence in your strengths, dear writer, or give it all up now and create apps instead.

Motion comics are just cheap animation. Very cheap animation. And I like animation almost as much as I like comics, but I'm not rushing to pay out for a cheap hybrid of the two.

You don't get 'The Unfinished Swan' or 'Shadow of the Colossus' or even Telltale's 'Walking Dead' until you've sat through the long, linear infodumps of something like 'Metal Gear Solid'.

As we get older, we demand stories that go somewhere. Things must change.

In good writing, the contemplative and the exciting happen at the same time.

If your agent or publisher is jumping up and down at the thought of your novel, it's because they're picturing the movie poster on the side of the bus.

'Frankenstein' is a work rich in possible meanings, so the horror-show interpretation is as valid as any.

A very great deal is written about the future of book publishing - much more than on its present or past - and the only takeaway from all these oracles seems to be that a great empire will be destroyed.

Storytelling isn't an Escher staircase.

Readers prefer a world they can relate to.

A new medium always has a period when it is struggling inside the confining box of an earlier medium. Creators have to unlearn what they knew before they can see the fresh, uncharted vistas stretching before them.

There is a great insatiable hunger for good stories throughout the media.

People nowadays think of gamebooks as rather old hat - and, after all, it was twenty years ago. In their heyday, though, they were a phenomenon, selling upwards of a hundred thousand units per title. And it's not as old hat as you might think: the same design skills I used in those days apply equally when I'm creating modern videogames.

Publishers were ever eager for authors to do their own publicity because nobody else was willing to do it for nothing. But then it became clear that if you want somebody to champion the story, there's nobody better than the person who made it all up.

The writer must be a transcendent, not immanent, deity.

When a medium like games or comic books whips up such a rapture of enthusiasm, naturally we look for lessons we should be learning.

Now, I admire The Sims as a game, but from a story viewpoint, there are two glaring problems. First, your relationship with those characters is like they're bugs in a jar. There's no empathy. And secondly, you've got this clunky, chemistry-set interface between you and them, with bars to show how tired or angry they are. It's all tell not show.

My first memory of the public library is of lugging home a volume of Norse myths as heavy as a thunder-god's hammer.

Standing out as a writer today requires more than a bright idea and limpid prose. Authors need to become businesspeople as well.

I could put a sudoku at the end of every chapter and you'd have to solve it to progress through the story, but that doesn't address what would make people want to interact.

Back in the early 1970s, what got me and another 400,000 kids out of bed without needing to be called twice was the latest issue of The Amazing Spider-Man.

One of the gamebook series I created, 'Fabled Lands', is also the name of my company, and the reason we named the company after it is that it was pretty revolutionary for its time.

When you're a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work.