Christopher Eccleston Quotes

You've got to trust your instincts, your judgment and trust the storytelling that came before and the quality of the acting with the emotion.

One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people.

The most important thing to realise is that everyone is capable of telling a story. It doesn't matter where we were born or how we grew up.

It's great fun if you get a good piece of writing and you can pretend to be someone else, tell a story that needs to be told, make some kind of connection. I've always fancied myself as a leading man, but I really doubt whether anyone else sees me that way.

You can start imagining all kinds of things characters would feel, but you have to have a sense of whether those imaginings might be right.

I'm going to make my own story for sure.

Just listen to your instincts. Don't talk to someone or start a relationship out of pity.

To invent a story, or admirably and thoroughly tell any part of a story, it is necessary to grasp the entire mind of every personage concerned in it, and know precisely how they would be affected by what happens; which to do requires a colossal intellect: but to describe a separate emotion delicately, it is only needed that one should feel it oneself; and thousands of people are capable of feeling this or that noble emotion, for one who is able to enter into all the feelings of someone sitting on the other side of the table.

In all my characters, I try to find an iota of myself, and in Castle, I found a lot. He gets away with a lot, so that's fun.

Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.

I feel like songwriting is an experiment in empathy.

I've always said I have one skill. That skill - if I have it at all - is storytelling.

I'm writing for my ideal reader, for somebody who's willing to take the time, who's willing to get lost in a new world, who's willing to do their part. But then I have to do my part and give them a sound and a voice that they believe in enough to keep going.

I want to be a part of the stories that need to be told.

Every kid has a story to tell!

Everyone seems quite good at stories and making them up.

I wish I didn't have ever to sign my long name on the cover of a book, and I wish I could write a story that would seem absolutely true to the child who hears it and to myself.

I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue.

You're a reader as well as a writer, so write what you'd want to read.

I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it's about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

When I play games, I'll make up little stories for just anything. It's almost the game of making up background stories for people you see on the street. You know what I mean? I wasn't exactly the popular kid in school growing up, so I found myself really observing people, and watching how they interact, and how they react to things.

There is something in human beings that loves stories.

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.