Colleen Atwood Quotes

I don't really know where my ideas come from. I start with a time and a place. That's what I need to get started, and an intellectual question.

My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.'

I keep on having ideas and developments. Some happen and some don't, but I still always have a way of telling a story.

An idea might spark an essay, but never a story.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

There are a few really fantastic stories left, and that kind of gives you some inspiration to find even new ones.

I find my characters and stories in many varied places; sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts, lively dinner party conversations and some even crawl out of the dusty remote recesses of my imagination.

You never know how - or when - the idea for a book will appear.

Sometimes I hear a voice - sometimes it's the voice of someone I know. And sometimes that leads to a character, which leads to a story.

So many stories, and to choose which ones to tell and how to tell them. The words, they will tap me on the shoulder and they will speak to me: 'Tell me! Tell me!' The stories choose me.

My books come to me in images, and sometimes the image is at the beginning of the book, and sometimes it's simply a flash somewhere in the middle.

The idea led me into the research, which continues to give me more ideas for the story.

If I don't have a project going, I sit down and begin to write something - a character sketch, a monologue, a description of some sight, or even just a list of ideas.

There are so many stories to be told, by so many good writers.

I don't know exactly where the ideas come from. One day, a sentence just popped into my head - 'There was going to be trouble, and, hell, he just wasn't in the mood for it' - and I knew I had a novel.

Some of the songs are inspired by personal things that have happened. Others have been inspired by other people's stories, you know, like someone that witnesses something and so I tell the story through my own eyes. And some songs are just about how I feel about the world and others about the places that we have travelled to.

Whenever I write a novel, most of the time it starts with barest slip of an idea.

I appreciate hearing different stories. It inspires me.

Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. Begin at the beginning. Tell Gregory a story. Make some light.

For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.

Everyone has a story, the air is full of stories. The creative process is mysterious, I don't know why it is that suddenly a theme will take hold of me and refuse to leave me in peace until I investigate it and write it.

A story doesn't live until it is imagined in someone's mind.

Most of my books begin with an image or a voice - one small thing - and I don't know what it is going to become.

The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me.

The urge to create a fictional narrative is a mysterious one, and when an idea comes, the writer's sense of what a story wants to be is only vaguely visible through the penumbra of inspiration.