James Frey Quotes

I looked at the world of books and just went, Oh my gosh, if I'm writing novels, I'm on the same shelves as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Petronius - whereas with comics, they've only been doing them for a hundred years, and there's stuff that nobody's done before. I think I'll go off and do some of the stuff no one's ever done before.

I don't write the same book over and over - I think if I did that, I would stop writing. I couldn't write a series with the same character, and I couldn't write a romance novel over and over again that takes place at a different beach every year. That's not who I am.

I think of myself as a songwriter, a weaver of story and imagination in a way that a novelist might write a book.

Some writers are writing one great, big book and just taking all these different avenues towards it. They might seem on the outside to be different, but they're really not. And that's a different kind of mindset. I don't know why it is, but I just feel like I really want to escape myself as much as I can - myself as the artist, or as the writer, or as the thinker - with each new project, because one, it's just boredom, but also, I guess I just feel most comfortable starting a new book if I just feel a little in the dark about it.

In Italian, the word for novel is romanzo, "the romance." The English is "novel" - something new. Both of those elements, experimentation and love, are fundamental to the form.

I know that the way to be a really successful writer is to write the same kind of book over and over again. Find the kind of thing that people like and just write one of those over and over again. I don't do that. I just keep doing different things.

As one of my creative writing professors once said, there are only seven plots. What makes those plots different is how you handle them, your voice, your style, and your way of thinking. That’s all. People can mimic your style, but they can never achieve your unique point of view.

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

Everyone is trying to do something that hasn't been done and that's a really good thing. You can only do so much with a story and some scripts don't give you the opportunities and other scripts do give you the opportunities to do things that haven't been done before.

A lot of things you just stumble into: relationships or ways of putting characters opposite one another that really worked. So then it's not always so much about imitating other people, but imitating yourself, at least in your thinking.

If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.

Every time I write a new book, I want to push myself to try something different.

Life would be much easier if I just wrote the same book over and over again. But I'm not interested in doing that.

Originality is, for me, the most important quality in a script.

I think I'm a born storyteller. Inspiration is all around me. I can read a newspaper article and come up with an idea for a book.

And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

I always try to incorporate something in every book that I've never used before. Hopefully, spontaneity will keep readers reading.

In a way, there's nothing new under the sun, so anything you write about has been written about by other people. All you can do is bring yourself to it, bring as much honesty as you can to it.

I want to write books.

I see myself more like a novelist or a polygamist than a musician in terms of my output.

What makes a book unique isn't always about having one big grand new idea. It's about combining many different ideas in new and interesting ways.

When Wes has a new a project, you know that it's going to be something as different as the previous was from the previous one. Each time, he tries to take you to a country, or a land that is unknown for you and for him, and reinvent this land. That's what he did with 'Darjeeling,' with 'Mr. Fox,' with 'Moonrise Kingdom.'

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

I never think about a movie when I'm writing a book, because I think only two things could happen and both of them are bad. You write a lousy novel and a lousy film.