Graeme Base Quotes

I can't think of a story that doesn't have something terrible in it. Otherwise, it's dull. So when I embarked into the world of picture books, my first thought was to do something about the dark.

'The Hobbit' didn't include female characters at all and was a very linear story, a book for children, really.

Whether it's music, loss of something, loneliness or friendship - if that emotion is heightened in some way and painted to fit in between the covers of 32 pages, that can become a picture book.

We always wanted to do a children's book of some form or another.

I firmly believe that a story is only as good as the villain.

You don't know when you are immersed in a book what the reaction to it will be, but I feel great about 'The Lake of Dreams.'

Fiction has a unique role in conveying Truth. In fact, only fiction that is Truth with a capital T is worthwhile.

Watch out, or I'm liable to put you in a story.

I think predictability is built into any good novel in some way - you begin reading Anna Karenina and you know pretty much what's going to happen at the end. But that doesn't mean you know what's going to happen in the middle. For me, it's that sense of what happens in the middle that's important.

I am a huge fan of world-building. I love doing it in my own books, and I love reading it done well.

A good story will keep you wondering about what's happening, what's going on, where does this go? Now it's going to go that way, now it's going to go that way. It has to do that. If it's predictable, it's just boring.

In 'Breaking Bad,' we have a lead character who definitely finds himself in a situation he would never have expected to find himself in normally.

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

I've always loved the wild rumpus in 'Where the Wild Things Are' by Maurice Sendak, because the words disappear, the pictures take up the whole page, and we move forward in the story by turning the pages.

I try to tell a story that's good enough to win the right to integrate eternal themes into it. If it's poorly written or comes across as a sermon, then obviously you don't reach people, because they're aware that you're imposing something on a story that isn't innate to it.

Then one day I thought it would be wonderful to make a whole book, to make my text and my drawings together, and that's how I started doing children's books.

Let's get right to it: On page 5 of Paul Murray's dazzling new novel, 'Skippy Dies,'... Skippy dies. If killing your protagonist with more than 600 pages to go sounds audacious, it's nothing compared with the literary feats Murray pulls off in this hilarious, moving and wise book.

You've either got to find a way to make your continuing characters insteresting without making them maudlin or overwrought, or you've got to put more emphasis on the suspects.

If fantasy is done well, it has both serious content in a literary fashion and is a really good read as well - and children and young adults won't suffer anything else.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

The theatre is supremely fitted to say: 'Behold! These things are.' Yet most dramatists employ it to say: 'This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.'

Plots may be simple or complex, but suspense, and climactic progress from one incident to another, are essential. Every incident in a fictional work should have some bearing on the climax or denouement, and any denouement which is not the inevitable result of the preceding incidents is awkward and unliterary.

Some people came up with story lines where Colonel Potter moves in with Klinger, and we become a 1950s' odd couple. I said, 'Come on, let's do something significant.'

The writers did a great job of adapting the characters from the 'Frozen' story and implementing them into the 'Once Upon a Time' world.

The challenge in any kind of storytelling, as far as I know, it is, you're looking for the moment that is completely unexpected, but at the same time, you think to yourself, 'Of course, that's the only way it could have gone.' It has to feel like it's the truth of it.