Matt Groening Quotes

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

We love to start from a real place, whether it's us or our friends or working on a story from a writer's friend.

When I was in high school, I started writing a serial novel, longhand, set in the Arthurian mythos, and influenced not incidentally by Marion Zimmer Bradley's 'The Mists of Avalon.'

I am pretty sure I will never get a better character name than Japonica Fenway.

The first time I ever wrote anything, it was an editorial column for my high school newspaper.

In fact, I think every book I've written has been inspired by a real event.

I think that, every individual you invent in narrative work, you have to have some root in who that person is. That may be an aspect of yourself; it may be an aspect of something that you like, that you don't like. It may be an aspect that you wish you had. Maybe something you admire in another person.

I was a junior at school, and I had just taken my first comics class, and we were doing an exercise for this other class where we had to create our own characters, and 'Nimona' just kind of came out of that. I decided that I liked her so much that I wanted to do a comic with her.

It begins with the kind of story the writers want to tell. We never sit around in those retreats and say, 'We really need to make a change. Let's change this character.' Or throw a dart at the wall and see what hits. It all begins with story.

I talk all the time about how much I read growing up and how much I love Stephen King and how he impacted my work from a genre perspective, but Pat Conroy wrote some of the most magnificent stories about characters who had to deal with dysfunctional families and try to find a place of honor in their own world and the pain of loss.

I believe any fiction writer is inspired by real life.

I cannot write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.

The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.

I actually think the reason I am interested in certain parts is because I was such a dweeb in high school. When you are such a loser, it's a helpful way in to a lot of characters because even very powerful people are not all that powerful really. They all had a high school. That vulnerability is completely permanent and, as an actor, it's a good thing.

I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.

My only obligation is to my characters. And they came from where I have been.

When Roseanne read the first script of mine that got into her hands without being edited by someone else she said, 'How can you write a middle-aged woman this well?' I said, 'If you met my mom you wouldn't ask'.

The thing that inspires me most is reading and just observing the people around me. I think those are the two things that make me want to write.

I write characters that are based on elements of people I know and experiences I've really had.

I don't do research for my novels. Obviously, in my other line of work as a reporter and a columnist, I've had the opportunity to get to know both social workers and TV talk-show hosts.

All of my stories, they don't come from my high school experience, but they're definitely based on things that happened to me in high school, or things that happened to friends of mine, or things that I wish had happened to me.

I never started from ideas but always from character.

One writes such a story [The Lord of the Rings] not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mold of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much personal selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one's personal compost-heap; and my mold is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.

However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.

Most people had high school. I had Breaking Bad.