Eli Roth Quotes

I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts.

I want to do a musical. I want to write a book. I have all these ideas and I can't get away from them.

I really just want to be a writer and a storyteller. But maybe pain is one of the things you have to feel in order to be creative.

The hardest part is not to repeat yourself. I don't really believe my core obsessions are going to change, but you need to look for ways to express them that are different. The main reason for doing that is not to bore yourself, and obviously, I don't want to bore readers.

I sort of love reading the scripts and going, 'Oh wow, what a great idea. I never would have thought of that.'

You can't wait for someone to give you a show. That can't be the first time you're writing and drawing a character.

Stories come to me and I don't know where they come from, but afterwards I can look back and say, 'Oh yes, that's got a little bit of me, or a little bit of my own son in it'. That's where ideas come from.

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

For me, it would be pointless to write a novel that I knew I could complete within a specific length of time. I could do that only by repeating something I had done before, and I've never wanted to do that.

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.

Storytelling is what lights my fire.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.

Especially when I write, I want to get out of people's heads and have them speak and have them get dressed and have them go to work.

I hope the wonder of what happens to my characters never goes away. That yearning keeps me writing.

It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.

I have an ideas book at home with far more ideas than I will ever be able to write.

With me, writing is 60% imagination, 30% people you know and 10% you don't know where it comes from.

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

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

I hate thinking about writer's block! I don't have writer's block much, knock on wood, but if I do, I think it's usually because I haven't done enough research and am therefore unable to create a fully realized world.

Television? It's a gateway to writer's block, isn't it?

When I read good stories, I want to write good stories too.

I find that it's really important for me to imagine characters and situations. That allows me a lot of freedom.