Jacqueline Woodson Quotes

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.

To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it.

It's a little bit like talking about the life of writing. The life of writing may be about many things, but it always begins with the writer. With the kernel of an idea, or a character, or an idea or a theme, or even an outcome. But for documentary photographers, photographs begin at that intersection of the real world and the imaginative inner world.

I devote most of my day to writing, and try to turn out at least four pages a day. As for what triggers the creative process, it's a mystery to me! Characters often just walk on the page, and I wait to see what they do and say while I'm writing them.

I keep drawing inspiration from people every day. All of a sudden, something strikes me so hard and dramatically, and then a dream comes - I sit down, cut it off and make a script out of it.

Animation is about creating the illusion of life. And you can't create it if you don't have one.

When I was young, I assumed that authors must have traveled the world or done exotic things in order to tell great stories.

When I write, I get glimpses into future novels.

Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.

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

Stories come to me in mysterious ways, more like dreams than reasoned creations.

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

I don't see the world unless I see it in ink.

There isn't an aspect of book creation I don't enjoy, and there has always been a book in my life to dream about or work on.

When I make a movie, I have both a specific and vague, amorphous dream idea of what the movie is going to be. Of course, I don't actually know what it's going to be, but I'm still striving to get to some place with it.

Most good media come out of somebody saying, 'This should exist; this is something I want to read.'

'The Lion' all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, 'Let's try to make a story about it.'

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

I just let the character speak to me and things appear.

Every so often when I'm writing, a character might actually be a distinct person in my head - often not an actor or a face, literally a person who just seems to exist in my imagination. Then the challenge is finding somebody who is close enough to that to make me feel like I've ended up where I wanted to be.

Once I'm given an idea for a story I have a million ideas on how it should be illustrated, but I don't have a big shoebox full of unfinished ideas.

My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words.

Mostly I wanted to be a writer, though for a couple of years there I wanted to be an animator, because I loved drawing and capturing beautiful movements.