Stan Lee Quotes

A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.

One has to be able to twist and change and distort characters, play with them like clay, so everything fits together. Real people don't permit you to do that.

Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.

Being a writer of fiction isn't like being a compulsive liar, honestly.

The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it's how you teach yourself to write.

I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

I could come up with 50 stories that I am thinking about.

I don't have to worry about writing jokes. I just tell stories about things that have happened to me. As long as I'm alive and I'm living and I'm experiencing different things every day, the show will always change.

The laws of literary creation are unique; they don't change, and they are the same for everyone everywhere. I mean that you can tell a story that covers three hours of human life or three centuries - it comes to the same thing. Each writer who creates something authentic in a natural way instinctively also creates the technique that suits him.

I can create countries just as I can create the actions of my characters. That is why a lot of travel seems to me a waste of time.

Most people who are trying to write kind of sit in their basements and pull it out of their imaginations.

Sure, best seller. I'd love to knock Stephen King off the top of the list. I know I won't, but, after all, I spend my life inventing a different reality.

My new novel 'Red Hook Road' began many years ago as a short article in the newspaper.

I feel like reading really defined me as a writer because I lived my life outside of my own body for so much of my life and I loved it. I've always been a reader. I think living all those stories served me to naturally take that next step to creating.

The novelist is the vestigial bone on the body cinema. We're like the little toe that can be cut off.

Freedom is the basic prerequisite for writing.

After putting the kids to bed, I would think about what I wanted to write.

When you're a writer and you're an adult, that's something you crave - that limitless imagination and love for worlds that don't exist that you can create.

When you compose, it's like writing. You're like a writer. You just think all the time.

I have been privileged to write across multiple facets of my life: to write romance novels, to write memoir, to write about leadership, and to write tax and social policy articles. The act of writing is integral to who I am. I'm a writer, a politician, a tax attorney, a civic leader, and an entrepreneur. I am proud of what I've accomplished.

The art of writing fiction is to sail as dangerously close to the truth as possible without sinking the ship

Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.

Don't write about what you know - write about what you're interested in. Don't write about yourself - you aren't as interesting as you think.

I think it was Fran Lebowitz who said that there are no writing prodigies. You have to have something to write about.