W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

I don't think you can teach someone how to come up with good characters or a story.

You can make up your own story when you look at a photo.

That's what a writer does; they make things up and that makes for good reading.

I was the kind of kid who was always making up stories and adventures.

I think good art should always be entertaining, or at least give pleasure of some sort. And my chief goal as a writer has always been to tell a good story and give my readers a good time.

I love the magic of stories and the power of stories.

I always had stories inside my head and one day I just decided to start writing them down. I didn't actually decide.

Facts are the soil from which the story grows. Imagination is a last resort.

You can start making up any kind of story if you want to.

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

It is at least worth arguing that there is a modicum of the creative novelist in all of us, and that this absorption with how men get out of difficulties, single-handedly and alone if possible, is the stuff of which we weave the warp and woof of our own better dramatic imaginings.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

There is no story unless you've written it.

A story doesn't live until it is imagined in someone's mind.

I keep on having ideas and developments. Some happen and some don't, but I still always have a way of telling a story.

The most important thing to realize is that everyone is capable of telling a story.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

To me, writing is fun. It doesn't matter what you're writing, as long as you can tell a story.

Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.

One of the fun things about play is making up stories.

Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.

Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.

For me, the pleasure of writing comes with inventing stories.

In movies, storytelling and every single art form, we're creating wonder. You're starting with a blank page and creating something that doesn't exist.