Chris Roberson Quotes

For English assignments I was constantly coming up with these strange adventure stories... But I actually wanted to be an artist, or maybe work in the comic book industry.

It turned out I really didn't like journalism. I wanted to make up stories, not cover real events.

I don't care whether the story is real or fantastical. I tell the story that needs to be told.

No, come to think of it, I don't think the Cure will end, but I can make up an ending if you want me to.

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.

I just feel so lucky to tell stories and make up stories and share them with people.

Quite casually I wander into my plot, poke around with my characters for a while, then amble off, leaving no moral proved and no reader improved.

I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.

Basically, I just write whatever story grabs me rather than considering the genre.

The idea of a flip book still really appeals to me. That idea of fiction and non-fiction.

I can't remember a time when I didn't write or make up stories, because it seemed to come with reading.

Novels give you the opportunity to create a whole world. Because you create people, you make them talk... You decide who they are, whether they live or die. It's the closest thing to feeling like a god that you can come to.

I love telling stories. Creating a character, a world, a whole universe out of nothing. That part I can't get enough of.

It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.

I've always written. At the age of six or seven, I would get sheets of A4 paper and fold them in half, cut the edges to make a little eight-page booklet, break it up into squares and put in little stick men with little speech bubbles, and I'd have a spy story, a space story and a football story.

I was always at heart a novelist and wanted to tell a bigger story, so I wanted to create people who told other kinds of truths than literal truths.

Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.

Writing is writing to me. I'm incapable of saying no to any writing job, so I've done everything - historical fiction, myths, fairy tales, anything that anybody expresses any interest in me writing, I'll write. It's the same reason I used to read as a child: I like going somewhere else and being someone else.

When I am writing anything in general, I just want to tell the story that exists in my head; I don't try to write a parable or make a point.

I just want to be told a story, and I want to believe I'm living that story, and I don't give a thought to influences or method or any other writerly concerns.

In any genre you're working in, you can always find a way to tell a particular kind of story. I love fantasy; I love science fiction. I love all kinds of fiction, in fact.

The novel space is a pure space. I'm nobody once I go into that room. I'm not gay, I'm not bald, I'm not Irish. I'm not anybody. I'm nobody. I'm the guy telling the story, and the only person that matters is the person reading that story, the target. It's to get that person to feel what I'm trying to dramatize.

I don't want to steal anybody's story. I very much want to use the stories that I hear to get lost in my mind, to tell a larger story.

I'll be left writing picture books and fairy tales.