Michelle Paver Quotes

I don't know what the secret is when I am writing it - it really is a surprise to me.

The other thing in composition is opening up the unconscious.

I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.

None of my books has been ever in my head; after they're finished, they go. It's like being a sort of medium; you just grab it when it's there then just release it when it's time to go. There's a lot of instinct, not planning.

In the case of the 'Saint' movie, I did do some research. I visited a few shelters. But usually, my stuff just comes out. I don't have any control over that.

You can't slot a time and a space and think 'ok now it's time to sit and compose.' It just doesn't work like that for me.

Stories have a richness that goes way beyond fact. My writing knows more than I know. What a writer must do is listen to her book. It might take you where you don't expect to go.

For me, you have to not have a formula. You have to not even sit down and say, 'I want to write right now.' It has to just kind of come out. It's not something you can plan.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

When I decide to write a story, I don't think too much about what I want it to be, I just let things come naturally and this is how it turns out. It's just how my subconscious works.

Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.

I'm always amazed by writers who tell me they plan everything at the beginning. I feel their writing days must be very bland.

I sometimes don't know what I'm writing when I start writing it, on some level.

I did go there later, but I hadn't been there before I wrote the book. Sometimes I feel like the imagined can feel more real than the real?

I try and make little stories. Whether it's with a pencil or with bits of records, it's really the same thing.

I think all writers write from the time they're really young, and you just start asking the question, 'What if?'

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

But this is neither here nor there why do I mention it? Ask my pen, it governs me, I govern not it.

What I do is write, and I try to write as closely as I can into what I call 'the mystery.'

For me, I get a part of an idea here and a little bit of an idea there, and then finally it accumulates into a movie.

I actually feel that the different kinds of stories come out of different parts of my brain.

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.

The great songs just come out. If it comes quick, just leave it that way.

The multilevel, the conscious and the unconscious, is natural when I write scripts, when I come up with ideas and stories.