Dries van Noten Quotes

I am always looking for ideas, whether it is in art on the street or in my world travels. It comes to me randomly and unexpectedly.

What's cool is when you're able to give your audience imagination and you don't have to cage them in like animals.

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it's going to happen.

There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen.

There's no game plan when it comes to thinking up new characters; inspiration can come from anything - from a wig I've seen to an expression I've heard someone use.

I don't expect to find inspiration. It just sort of comes. Sometimes you step on a bug and you get inspired.

The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.

You can draw inspiration from anything. If you're a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl, or somebody you're casually talking to says something that makes you so mad - you can create an entire scenario around that.

I want to liberate my imagination and my mind with every kind of movie. That is what I wanted to do all my life.

Everything you do on set is directly related to your imagination when you read the script for the first time.

I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.

I never planned on doing a book about Paul Farmer or his organization. I met him in Haiti when I was on a magazine assignment. It's almost like his story sort of fell in my lap.

I try not to be overly literal. When I'm writing songs, I write down a lot of words, and then I try to simplify it. I like to give people hints or words that make visual pictures for them.

I'm just looking as always for something that's stimulating and I hope to find a good story that's a challenge, whether it's big or small. Or that it finds me. I don't have like a career plan. Maybe I should, but I don't.

What inspired me to become an author? I think it was the snow in New York. I looked out the window and I said, 'Well, I have to get dressed every morning to go to teach, but if I write a book, I can stay home in my bathrobe, eat candy corn.'

I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.

I've spoken often of how the fantasy genre is able to, with the greatest freedom among all the genres, take a metaphor and make it real. But of course that's only the starting point.

I've read up on magic, and I think it sets you free, and it gives you hope. You can explore worlds you didn't know existed. It stretches your imagination, and I like my own imagination to be stretched and also the children I'm telling the story to. It gives you a sense of wonder.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

For me, when I 'discover' a story, there is a feeling of buoyancy and clarity, perhaps similar to early morning out on a prairie highway, when darkness lifts and reveals the outline of farmhouses and copses of trees in the distance.

I can write most places. I particularly like writing on trains. Being between places is quite liberating, and looking out of the window, watching a procession of landscapes and random-ish objects, is very good for stories.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

I don't have a great imagination to share something with you that you don't know, so it's about interpreting things - a dialogue.

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

There's something peculiar about writing fiction. It requires an interesting balance between seeing the world as a child and having the wisdom of a middle-aged person. The further you get from childhood and the experience of the teenage years, the greater the danger of losing that wellspring.