Patrick Rothfuss Quotes

People always want narratives to be clean and easy.

I've been falsely accused of drawing too much from real life. But I am a petty thief - I take little things. And, I mean, I can hardly write 10 words before I start to make things up. I start to invent, because that's what I want to do. I'm running away to an invented place.

Too much detail can bog down any story. Enough with the history of gunpowder, the geology of Hawaii, the processes of whaling, and cactus and tumbleweed.

But what I hope for from a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer.

There is nothing wrong with just telling the story.

I think it's such a challenge to tell a story, and I think, to be honest, the shorter, the clearer, the better.

I kind of hate over-explanation in comics.

I suppose what I aspire to do is to make it easy for the audience to connect with a story.

There is so much goodness in real life- do let us keep it out of our books.

Who need to read about real life when there's dragons. Come on!

In real life, things don't all end at the nice same place. To keep the story real, there has to be kind of a ragged edge at the end of a novel.

I'm removed in my real life, and unable to express certain things face to face. So I have always found myself in this fantasy world. That's why I started writing songs and stories from a very young age. I'd much rather walk around anonymously cooking up tales than face the people that I have known forever.

Sometimes what I wouldn't give to have us sitting in a bar again at 9:00 a.m. telling lies to one another, far from God.

[I]nstead of the usual "Why can't we make movies more like real life?" I think a more pertinent question is "Why can't real life be more like the movies?"

We always have the movies that are more toward real life, but they don't have that much drama or suspense, or we have the full of drama or suspense, but they're far away from real life. Always when I was watching a film, films with good drama, I was thinking, "I wish they were more close to real life." But when I was watching real life films I was thinking, "Well I wish it had more drama." I've tried, in the movies that I worked so far, to get these two things closer and closer to each other.

There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.

Don't we want to escape our real world and go into something larger than that, simpler than that, more beautiful or darker?

I wish my life was a John Grisham novel. His heroes always seem to be one step away from death but come up with a brilliant plan. Unfortunately, real life can’t be wrapped up with a nice little bow

Real life is sometimes boring, rarely conclusive and boy, does the dialogue need work.

Real life is not like a movie. Even the best movies, the most rich, fleshed-out movies are not as rich and nuanced as detailed as real life or an actual human being.

What did a happy ending even mean in real life, anyway? In stories you simply said, 'They lived happily ever after,' and that was it. But in real life people had to keep on living, day after day, year after year.

I go to the real world, not the Internet.

The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life; it’s so easy to make it complex.

Not thinking about anything is Zen. Once you know this, walking, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is Zen.