Jo Beverley Quotes

I think writing is an extension of a childhood habit - the habit of entertaining oneself by taking interesting bits of reality and building upon them.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'

Anyone who has set out to invent a purely imaginary story knows that the whole thing is fantasy, from beginning to end; there must be a sense of magic created about the most restrained of naturalism.

I make it all up, and all of it is true.

Even as a little kid, I told lots of stories, and I wrote them down, and I loved reading fiction and fantasy.

I take inspiration from my life but only twenty per cent is real the rest is all made up.

Truth maybe stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.

I like the notion of making stuff up or letting your imagination go away with you.

I've been falsely accused of drawing too much from real life. But I am a petty thief - I take little things. And, I mean, I can hardly write 10 words before I start to make things up. I start to invent, because that's what I want to do. I'm running away to an invented place.

I wrote my first short story in third grade.

I started writing stories as a child.

My mother talked about the stories I used to spin as a child of three, before I started school. I would tell this story about what school I went to and what uniform I wore and who I talked to at lunchtime and what I ate, and my mother was like, 'This girl does not even go to school.'

Fantasy for me as a kid was real, and I had a fantasy about what life was, whether it was sort of wicked and dire, or wholly normal, or whatever. Anything really close to home is not, it seems to me, what a good book should be about.

I was so in love with books from as early as I remember that it seemed a natural step to want to create them. And so I just wanted to be a writer from a very young age. And I think that the lies were just a natural side effect of me wanting to tell stories and write them down.

The truth is always less interesting than the fiction.

I would sit on the swing set and swing literally for two hours, just, like, imagining things. Like, what if this happened, and what if I was this guy?

Fiction makes your dreams come true, and, as a writer, fiction allows you to delve into the area of miracles.

My life isn't very racy or exciting so I make things up, tell stories. I like telling stories.

I feel that entertainment happens when fact and fiction is balanced.

I write as if I've lived a lot of things I haven't lived.

Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.

I think both you and I, we live in a world of fiction and stories.

I had these cheap alien toys and I made up stories for them. They were space pirates. They didn’t have names so I made up names. These were the first stories I wrote. Even as a little kid I was thinking about torture.