Lincoln Child Quotes

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

I always pull from something I know really well. Because I would never want to write about something that I hadn't experienced or that I hadn't witnessed happen to somebody else because it wouldn't be genuine.

I always think about the books I'm doing in pretty much the same way. I'm simply trying to write that particular novel as well as that particular novel can be written. I want to listen to what it is telling me, trying to figure out what it wants to do as much as what I want to do with it. There's a negotiation that's constant and ongoing between me and the material I'm working with, because I'm trying to listen to it.

All fiction becomes autobiographical when the author has true talent.

Everything I've written is personal - it's the only way I know how to write.

I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.

I think a novel has to be about where you are at a given moment in time. I think it really needs to represent some specific pain you're going through. it's not just a story.

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.

As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

I think it's nearly impossible to write something fictional without having it be about yourself in some way or another.

Anyway, in my writing I've always been interested in finding places to stand, and I've found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I'm writing about.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.

You write about what you know.

Everything I've written is based on something that has happened to me or something that I know a great deal about.

I write about what I know.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

I realized I couldn't have one foot in the fiction world and one foot in the nonfiction world, which is why 'Here I Go Again' is so not me. I didn't graduate from high school in the '90s, I never listened to metal music, and I don't time travel.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm usually just trying to write about things that are interesting to me.

When I started writing 'A Million Little Pieces,' I felt like it was the right story with the style I had been looking for, and I just kept going.

It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.

I've always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to be faithful to my own experience.

I write what feels real. I write things that are informed both by my own experience and by actual history.

So many of my songs are based on things that either happened to me or to someone I know, but there are also ones where I've written a made-up story. All of them are about very real emotions, and I just find different ways to express them.

Writers are looking for a story. Using your own life as the basis for a story gives it an association with reality that's a wonderful starting point.