Markus Zusak Quotes

When I wrote my fictional novels, they always had a starting point of something real. Those images that are not real are exactly the same strength and power of the real ones, and the line between them is completely blurred.

He understood the way that you could sometimes fall right into them, as if each page was a hole into another world.

The telling of stories creates the real world.

Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world.

I don't think I wrote stories down when I was young, but I certainly made them up, perhaps sometimes losing track of the border between reality and make-believe.

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'

Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.

I was well traveled, and I created this illusion of literacy through reading and writing. I wrote a book of short stories.

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

I write for the same reason I read: to find out what's going to happen.

Films are always a fiction, not documentary. Even a documentary is a kind of fiction.

One of my greatest pleasures is falling into a story someone else has written.

As a child, I read a great many books in which animals and birds played significant roles, not only in the narrative itself, but also in creating the emotional and psychological atmosphere of that narrative - the imaginative furniture, as it were, in which any story unfolds.

From earliest times, humans - explorers and thinkers - have wanted to figure out the shape of their world. Forever, the way we've done that is through storytelling. It is difficult to let the truth get in the way of a good story.

When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave.

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

I've always liked stories. I'm always reading, ever since I was a kid. I've always been reading and wanting to be in some other world.

A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

I like short stories.

Once I opened a book, I felt compelled to finish it. I was drawn into a world, and I had to know what would happen, how it would end.

What's fascinating to me is the way that multiple stories go into creating any world - a fictional world, but certainly the world that we live in as well. Of course, I cannot control that world. I can just control the fictional world.

As a reader, I happen to like turning pages and wanting to know what happens next.