Kirby Larson Quotes

My first novel, 'Sacrifice,' was set on the Shetland Islands.

When I was in my late twenties, a friend suggested that, since I was an avid SF reader and had been since I was barely a teenager, that since it didn't look like the poetry was going where I wanted, I might try writing a science fiction story. I did, and the first story I ever wrote was 'The Great American Economy.'

I first started writing historical fiction in the late '70s and kept pictures of Kathleen Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers on my refrigerator until my first book was published by Avon in 1982. The biggest advantage of this genre for me is that it allows me to blend fact and fiction.

I have 20 or 30 books completely plotted out in my mind - mysteries, thrillers, horror, romance, science fiction. You name it.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

When I wrote my first book, 'The Tennis Party', my overriding concern was that I didn't write the autobiographical first novel. I was so, so determined not to write about a 24-year-old journalist. It was going to have male characters, and middle-aged people, so I could say, 'Look, I'm not just writing about my life, I'm a real author.'

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

I would like to write a book that wasn't so violent and weird, but I just don't think I can do that with my talent. I don't think it would come off.

What I really like to do is write 'genre' stories without a cartoonish element. I did the same with 'Da Vinci's Demons,' and I'll do the same with 'Man of Steel.'

I am never not thinking about stories. 'The Bone Season' is 90% of my brain - 10% is interacting with the rest of the world.

While I was in high school, I discovered and began writing science fiction.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

It would have been very easy to drift into writing a non-fiction book so by taking it away from Nottingham I forced myself to imagine much more of it.

I absolutely adore writing books with paranormal elements - and I love creating the often-complex worlds and/or plots that go along with those stories - but at the heart of all of that, you have the characters, and when you get down to the core of it, it's spending the time with the characters that is what I truly love.

I started my career as a novelist. 'Veronica Mars' was first imagined as a novel.

I find that nonfiction writers are the likeliest to turn out interesting novels.

I wanted to learn about the worlds I wanted to write about in fiction.

Ever since I was young, 14 or 15, I wondered if you could write a book that combined the visceral thrill of watching a movie with the total immersion you feel when you're inside a good book. And I had some success as a screenwriter before I began writing books.

You always try to do your own thing. One of the things I wanted to do was to write a book that combines some of the best traits of contemporary fantasy with some of the traits of the historical novel.

Obviously, I love to do both contemporary and historical fiction. When a hint of a story grabs me, I try to go with it to see where it will take me whatever the setting.

Having written for film and television, I had little interest in turning 'The Good Father' into a Hollywood thriller. I was writing a novel, and novels demand that the writer goes deeper, both emotionally and thematically.

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

The story and the characters of 'Girl Online' are mine.

There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.