Umberto Eco Quotes

I think that my passion for writing fantasy began at about the same time as my passion for reading fantasy.

I've loved sci-fi and speculative fiction since I was a kid. It was inevitable I'd try my hand at it at some point.

I played lots of fantasy games. I would create these worlds, and I would believe in them.

I think it's fun to play with worlds that you can add a lot of your own imagination to. With 'True Blood,' you're not limited by anything, there are just leaps and bounds of the imagination you can take with these characters.

With novels, you're representing things. You're not explaining.

Writing fiction is an act of imaginative empathy.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

I do take this insane pleasure in world-building. I get the world in my head, but I have to make sure everyone else gets it.

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.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

To tell a good story and to illuminate the world: the two things are completely linked. That is the point. That is what I've always wanted to do.

What I like about writing a stand alone novel is you're starting with a fresh world and fresh characters. Part of what I love about writing is that journey of discovery where it's all new to me as well.

The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.'

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

When everything does seem out of control, writing fiction is a way I can order that chaos and restore some sort of meaning. I like the playful aspect of writing fiction. You know how it is when we are kids and we make up our worlds: You be this guy, and I am going to be this guy, and we are going to go slay dragons.

People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

I like to think of myself as a storyteller.

One of the things that writing has taught me is that fiction has a life of its own. Fictional places are sometimes more real than the view from our bedroom window. Fictional people can sometimes become as close to us as our loved ones.

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.

I like inventing things when I write rather than autobiography.

I find my characters and stories in many varied places; sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts, lively dinner party conversations and some even crawl out of the dusty remote recesses of my imagination.

I make things up for a living. It would be pretty boring to just fictionalize real people.

The good thing about writing a novel is that you're creating an imaginary world and can take a break when you need to.

Fiction is a report from the interior.