Nicholas Sparks Quotes

I started writing stories in my spare time.

If I can tell you the story from beginning to end in five minutes, I'm ready to start writing.

When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

I consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch my materials.

I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.

The story sometimes writes you into a corner.

I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.

Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.

It can be hard to write a skillfully entertaining fiction, but a great book wants to be more, and wants more from us.

Writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

A story to me must have some surprise...I must have a passion to write the story.

I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.

Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.

Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write stories.

If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.

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

Every day, I learn something new. I think one of the most exciting things for a writer is to work on a TV show. It's like a novel. You have a really long time to develop and learn about the characters, and you can just really keep digging in deeper, every week.

Marc Cherry is so good at writing himself into a corner, then writing himself out of that corner. It's really fun to watch that.

It's rare that I actually have a story in my head. I have events or 'what's the next move?' Like, Maggie, 'where's she going to go in this story, where's she going to end up?' Then the story has to fill in the in-between, and that comes as I'm starting it.

You can't visit readers where you think they are. You have to invite them home to where you are and try to lure them into your universe. That's the art of storytelling.

I've tried to write deep and serious. I spent years working to write a story that would make my writing group cry.

There are a lot of good stories out there, but I haven't found too many great scripts.

My job as an author - at least the way I think of it - is to make a story that is coded and puzzling enough to entice conversation and interpretation, but also to do the opposite: to make some things clear so that it is meaningful in some way, not just a random assemblage of ideas.