Dave Eggers Quotes

The laws of literary creation are unique; they don't change, and they are the same for everyone everywhere. I mean that you can tell a story that covers three hours of human life or three centuries - it comes to the same thing. Each writer who creates something authentic in a natural way instinctively also creates the technique that suits him.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

I wrote my first short story in third grade.

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.

Fairy tales and folk tales are part of the DNA of all stories and great fun to write.

The word story is intended to alert the reader to the fact that, however closely the narrative may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at work.

I always was interested in prose. As a teenager, I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and I find this more difficult in poetry.

Fiction is the most joyous, beautiful, sophisticated, wonderful thing in the world.

You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.

NOVEL, n. A short story padded.

Writing is storytelling. No matter how you slice it, you're saying, 'Once upon a time.' That's what writing is all about.

We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works

The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.

Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.

I write for the same reason I read: to find out what's going to happen.

If you want to tell stories, be a writer, not a filmmaker.

There is something in human beings that loves stories.

All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.

I started writing stories in my spare time.

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.

There is a great insatiable hunger for good stories throughout the media.

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

Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.