A. E. van Vogt Quotes

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

I think I'm attracted to writers who tell us something about ourselves.

You're reluctant to give too much away when you're going to put it out there for other people. It's harder writing your truest fears and loves and guilts, because you're not sure when you're writing the right story.

At least for me, writing a book is continual exposure to blind spots. There were things I wanted to be true and wanted to believe, but it always got more complicated in the fiction.

I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.

It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you're not.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

I always find stuff in my characters to relate to.

I think that whenever a book is not a challenge, I'm telling the wrong story.

I was 12. Our, teacher made us write an autobiography and I realised that I wasn't very interesting. I began to make things up, and that's when I thought maybe I was a writer, or at least a fiction writer.

I think of myself as a guy who tries to write screenplays and now has tried to direct one. Anything more than that is meaningless and it gets in the way of being a real human being.

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

I'm not a natural storyteller at all. If anything, I'm a natural interviewer, a natural listener, but I'm not a natural storyteller.

The cool thing about Kyle Killen, he writes really defined characters. I was a big fan of 'Awake' and also 'Lone Star.' I just think that he's a really, really special writer, and complex and deep, and a really smart dude.

Someday I would like to be the kind of writer who barrels through a draft, but I can't even seem to barrel through an interview like this, so I imagine I have a long way to go.

I like to tell my own story using my personality and my insight, the way I see things.

When I write, it's like choosing which shoes I'm going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal - but I sometimes have to put myself in other people's shoes.

Stories have a richness that goes way beyond fact. My writing knows more than I know. What a writer must do is listen to her book. It might take you where you don't expect to go.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

When I write, I solemnly visit myself.

A story isn't a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It's an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty.

If I feel like I'm going too far in one direction, I just can it. It's a weird thing. Some of my songs might be cheesy; I try and keep it light. It's hard to explain.

I'm always talking to the writers because I find it so fascinating, how they're able to go to these different levels with the different stories, and have all these layers to peel back.

I always describe writing a story as throwing bowling pins in the air and then catching them.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.