Henning Mankell Quotes

Writing will be like a journey, every word a footstep that takes me further into undiscovered land.

You don't have to fight dragons to write books. You just have to live deeply the life you've been given.

In order for me to write a scene, it's very important for me to see and experience everything with my own eyes, so yes, I was able to visit some remarkable houses and destinations while I was in China.

Everyone has early fiction fantasies, but it wasn't until my second child Betsy was born that I allowed the urge to write a novel bubble up.

One thing I always did in my career was writing. I always was writing. I was trying to create things. For myself, for other people.

I can create countries just as I can create the actions of my characters. That is why a lot of travel seems to me a waste of time.

I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.

As long as there are things to wonder about, there are stories to be written about them. That makes me happy, because writing about things seems to be my thing.

I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.

I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer. Come dream with me.

I wanted to escape Small Town U.S.A. To dismiss the boundaries, to explore. My life experience came from watching movies, TV, and reading books and magazines. When your culture comes from watching TV everyday, you're bombarded with images of things that seem cool, places that seem interesting, people who have jobs and careers and opportunities.

I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.

Writing is such a good thing to do because you can't really get bored with it. If you're bored with writing, you're bored with life.

I wrote one called 'The No Hotel.' I got inspired in 1989 while I was on a trip down to Brazil, and I didn't finish it until eight years later.

I'd waste a holiday trying to set a story in this new place I'd visit, whereas I would never write a story about Indianapolis.

I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.

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.

One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.

The fact that people will pay you to talk to people and travel to interesting places and write about what intrigues you, I am just amazed by that.

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot's turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm's blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.

Traveling gives you some perspective of what the rest of the world is like. I think that having the courage to step out of the norm is the most important thing.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

If somebody asked me about my inspiration I would say that it's not the peopleand it's not the things, it's travel and experiencing different environments.

To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.