Gayle Forman Quotes

I think the most important thing when you're telling a story is to just tell the story as best as you possibly can.

I wrote my first short story in third grade.

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

At a certain moment, I decided to write a story. I had no more small children to tell them stories.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

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

Surely the job of fiction is to actually tell the truth. It's a paradox that's at the heart of any kind of storytelling.

Fiction lags after truth.

I make it all up, and all of it is true.

If you're a fan of anything I do, I'm always telling a story. I'm into that - I like it when you don't know if it was true or not.

I'll take a certain concern of my own or a situation and try to frame it around a fictional story, but sometimes just straight-up autobiographical songs work well, and sometimes a story is better. I like stories. I like to hear them. I don't think there are enough of them in songs anymore.

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.'

As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness.

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.

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

I don't believe that anything's totally invented... If you're completely inventing a story, there wouldn't be an urge to tell it.

A work of fiction is conceived very much the same way as a dream occurs in the mind of a sleeper. But a lot of it is imagination. It's not based on real people.

I like short stories.

I tell stories. That's what I do. I've always told stories.

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it's going to happen.

In order to dream, you need to have a springboard which is the facts... It gives it that touch of reality, and I think that's quite important... truth with fiction.

I think writing is an extension of a childhood habit - the habit of entertaining oneself by taking interesting bits of reality and building upon them.

The truth is always less interesting than the fiction.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

I think I'm a born storyteller. Inspiration is all around me. I can read a newspaper article and come up with an idea for a book.