Michelle Paver Quotes

Though my stories aren't autobiographical, I do sometimes use things from my life.

In my books I try to tell a good story, not give messages.

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.

No matter how close to personal experience a story might be, inevitably you are going to get to a part that isn't yours and, actually, whether it happened or not becomes irrelevant. It is all about choosing the right words.

My books aren't autobiographical.

In my mind, there's not a great difference between what people call fiction and non-fiction. So in that sense, I'm like an early-18th-century person. I actually believe there's one way of writing.

I love to read the kind of books I write. Genre-breaking. Fresh-concept. World-building. My all-time top three authors would have to be Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Harris, and Pat Conroy.

That's the miracle of fiction. I use it to spray on certain moments or places from my youth.

There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.

The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

I don't think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

I'm writing about real things. Real people. Real characters. You have to believe what I write about is true or you wouldn't pay any attention at all. Sometimes it's me, or a composite of me and other people. Sometimes it's not me at all.

There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

That's one thing about fiction: you can make the world be the way you think it should be.

One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people.

I'm always saying that my books are not autobiographical because they're not. I can't choose any one scene and say, 'Oh, this is exactly what happened to me!' I just use little snippets of things as a starting point!

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.

I started writing stories in my spare time.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

I'm a magpie in my fiction, taking whatever looks shiny and curious to line the nest of my story.