Ismail Kadare Quotes

'Macbeth' was the first play I ever read. In fact, I remember my brother Tom, who is six years older than me, coming home from school and telling me about it. He was the one that really got me going.

Having spent so much of my life with Shakespeare's world, passions and ideas in my head and in my mouth, he feels like a friend - someone who just went out of the room to get another bottle of wine.

'The Brownies and the Goblins' is the only book I recall from my early childhood and is the inspiration for a children's book I wrote in the 1980s titled 'The Magic Spectacles.'

The arts have always been in and around my life.

Since the age of 11, I have loved writing poems and fragments from my life.

I started improvising the Cliff character, based on someone I grew up with.

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.

My mother is a huge fan of my work. I told her about 'Coraline' long before the film was made, and she got the book and read it. She reminded me that when I was about five years old, I used to sit in the kitchen for hours and talk about my 'other' family in Africa, my other mother and father. I had totally forgotten that.

I sat down and wrote what I remembered about being nine, and that eventually became 'Amelia's Notebook.'

I don't think I really invented anybody. I have drawn on real life.

I think every character I've ever come up with has been based on someone or something I've known.

When I was four years old, some friends of my family took me to see 'Fantasia' and I was totally blown away. From that minute on I wanted to be an animator.

I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter.

I started writing movie scripts. They excited me a lot, but I didn't like them when they were finished because they were simple copies of the films I saw in childhood.

I've always listened to music while I write, but none of my work has been so directly impacted by a song as my new novel, 'So Cold the River,' for which the brilliant strings piece 'Short Trip Home,' composed by Edgar Meyer and featuring the incredible Joshua Bell on violin, inspired much of the story.

I do tend to take lines from other lines I like, and then write around them.

Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted.

From an early age, I had always loved drawing. Laying on the floor, in front of the fire, drawing from my imagination, marching soldiers, dive bombers, spaceships and monsters. Now, suddenly, I was drawing from real life!

All writers are magpies, right? We're always stealing bits from different places and then weaving them into our little nest.

I've always been drawn to writing for young readers. The books that I read growing up remain in my mind very strongly.

'Jurassic Park' and 'Star Wars' shoved me into loving sci-fi and film in general when I was a barely coherent 3-year-old. And 'Lord of the Rings' took me to another planet entirely. Before that series, I knew I loved writing, but after, I knew that I had to write.

I've been with Shakespeare all my life.

'Macbeth' is one of those books that demand all of your attention.

I started writing stories when I was six years old. I was a very shy kid, extremely shy, and I had a fabulous first-grade teacher who told me to write.

I believe any fiction writer is inspired by real life.