Patrick Rothfuss Quotes

With writing fiction, I'm either not courageous enough or just not suited for telling truths in a more conventional way. As an actor, I inhabit those characters as I'm writing them.

I make pictures to tell a story, to tell lies, and to amuse.

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced that there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes but by no means always find the way to do it.

Both costume and fashion are about telling a story, except that in a ballet the story has already been written by the composer or the librettist.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

How do you capture the drama of a Rembrandt painting in a movie? How do you feel that moment that they captured in two hours? I kind of fell into it and at one point, I decided I wanted to live an art life; I wanted to tell stories. I came to New York, and did what most people do - you become a PA and run and get coffee and pay your dues and learn until your opportunity comes.

I've been transformed by stories, and I think that storytelling is definitely sacred. I take it very seriously because my life has been changed, whether it was a movie, a play, a piece of writing, poetry, a painting.

I see all art as a complement to telling people's stories. I'm in the storytelling business. I believe that the humanity that all of us share is the stories of our lives, and everybody has a story. Your story is as important as the next person's story.

I've had frustrated storytelling juices that have been lying dormant for a long time, and I guess the documentary was a way of me telling a story that I felt most qualified to tell. And I loved it, and I'd love to do something else someday, probably more narrative-based. But I'm in no rush.

I was only photographing in words the reality of it all.

I really like telling stories. When I was a kid, I wanted to write songs. In quite a fundamental, gratifying, childish way, I enjoy the doing of telling a story.

I achieved perfection, my type of perfection - visual storytelling. Storytelling was my style.

I get some flak for and some resistance from colleagues for because I'm interested in storytelling. I mean what I like about songwriting is songs used to tell a story.

I really think I shall commence chapter forty-four," he said, patting his hands together. "I shall commence, I think, with a slight exaggeration and go on from there into an outright lie. Constance, my dear?" "Yes, Uncle Julian?" "I am going to say that my wife was a beautiful woman.

You can't transmit a landscape, happily enough.

Artists have the unique ability to tell stories. It's not charts and graphs that get people to change.

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.... Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.... Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.

Whether it's movies or television that I've directed, or characters that I've played, I'm just always fascinated by the moral ambiguity inherent in life.

There's this sense of being strange, which is at the heart of every creative person. Every writer, every actor, every director knows who Ripley is. We've made careers and lives out of pretending, making things up, inhabiting other people's stories and lives. That's what I do every day. . . . The story is so audacious and subversive: a central character who behaves badly and isn't apparently caught. That intrigued me no end.

Acting is acting, as far as I'm concerned and, you know, how you manifest it is, at the end of the day, not the point. It's how it affects the story & how it affects the audience. And if people are hungry to be told stories, using, using this form then there's a reason for that.

A story isn't a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It's an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty.

You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way.

All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.

Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!