Patricia MacLachlan Quotes

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

I came up with a story and I wrote it.

I learnt to love reading. And then I started scribbling stories, and I liked that even more.

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

I make things up for a living. It would be pretty boring to just fictionalize real people.

I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

I like going back and writing fiction.

Most of the things in 'The Things They Carried' didn't happen to me. Ninety-five percent of it's invented. It's not what occurred.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

Writing fiction, I really just sit there and it just comes.

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

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building.

A story in your head isn't a story. It's just a daydream until you actually write it down. So write it down.

My books aren't autobiographical.

I never took creative writing.

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

Writing can be fun. I think the challenge is to convey interesting things in accessible ways, and that's what I aim to do in books.

I love movies, but I would love to write as many graphic novels as people would read from me.

I enjoy both TV writing and novel writing, and they are very similar. The goal is to entertain and amuse the audience, and I subscribe to this P.G. Wodehouse piece of advice: "Try to give pleasure with every sentence."

The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own.

Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.

But basically, I'm trying to write a fun story.

I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel.

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