Xavier Dolan Quotes

The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it's how you teach yourself to write.

I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started.

I never get sick of writing my own stories because there's a certain comfort in knowing you will never run out of material. It's relaxing, actually, to write.

Though The Kite Runner was my first completed novel, I had been writing on and off for most of my life, primarily short stories, and primarily for myself.

My first and biggest love was always fiction writing. But it is a very lonely pastime.

Writing a novel is a lot like reading one.

Most people who are trying to write kind of sit in their basements and pull it out of their imaginations.

When I was in fourth grade, a novelist came to talk to my English class. She told us that being an author meant sitting at the kitchen table in pajamas, drinking tea with the dogs at your feet.

Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.

I think I would like to write screenplays, books, really anything.

Authors are ordinary people who usually start to live apart, in the imagination, because they don't fit in with normal, healthy people.

I always had stories inside my head and one day I just decided to start writing them down. I didn't actually decide.

It might be more difficult because you haven't got a book or a prop, but for the most part I like to write unpaid... initially and my own stories.

I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

Writing fiction is a good way to inhabit other minds, if not other lives.

The older I get and the more fiction I write, the more I outline, the more I think about plot before I dive in and plunge too far.

There is no story unless you've written it.

I'm writing books. They're still a mix of fact and fiction and will continue to be. I think it's an interesting place to work.

I never started writing because I wanted to write myself stuff. It was really more that I had these stories to tell, and I wanted to work with people that I respected and liked.

Some writing courses will advise you to write what you know. I've always thought this is very odd advice ... because it means, for example, that I should not be writing about Nicholas Flamel, because I didn't live in France in the 15th Century, I was not an alchemyst, am not immortal (despite the rumours) and do not know magic.

I love writing fiction - you can take just what you want from a place, and leave the rest.

I very much write from characters. Those people start speaking, and then I have them in the house with me and I live with them. Then at some point, it's time to get them out of the house. You can only live with someone like Dr. Georgeous Teitelbaum from THE SISTERS ROSENSWEIG for so long, and then it's time for her to go. But it is very like having the company of these people and trying to craft them in some way into a story.

I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an author.

Writing stories, adopting other characters, making up fantastic stories and tales, this is a way of perhaps enhancing who I am. Writing stories takes a commonplace old life and makes it all somehow more interesting. And hopefully I can do that in a way that touches a lot of people in their lives, too.

People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.