Anthony Doerr Quotes

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

As a writer, it is always fun to imagine yourself in someone else's shoes.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

I was always inventing characters and making up stories.

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

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

I write because I have always been curious about what it would feel like to be someone else, in a different situation. Fiction is a wonderful way of exploring that.

It's the imagination that is involved in sci-fi, and fantasy is what draws me to it. Stories, everything.

Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I'm still awake. I can continue yesterday's dream today, something you can't normally do in everyday life.

I've just always been very interested in story above all.

In real life, writers tend to be quite boring, but in our books, we're having exciting adventures all the time.

To write a story is to create a world of your own.

Any fictional story will take things from real events.

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.'

To tell a good story and to illuminate the world: the two things are completely linked. That is the point. That is what I've always wanted to do.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.

Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

I loved fantasy role play.