Jonathan Nolan Quotes

Narrative becomes the way you make sense of chaos. That's how you focus the world. It's the only reason you should ever try this writing job.

Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.

Whatever I'm thinking about has got to fit into thirty-two pages, the standard picture book size. So that's something. But the structure and the form for me are almost the most important, because these will express as much as words and images will the content of the work.

In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.

Stories have tangents; they open up and become different things. You can still have a structure, but you should leave room to dream. If you stay true to your ideas, filmmaking becomes an inside-out, honest kind of process. And if it's an honest thing for you, there's a chance that people will feel that, even if it's abstract.

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.

The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses.

When I started the 'Broken Empire' trilogy, I thought it was a short story, and I didn't know the beginning, middle, or end of even that.

My childhood was surrounded by books and writing. From a very early age I was fascinated by storytelling, by the printed word, by language, by ideas. So I would seek them out.

There are many ways to go about a story. And if you give yourself some formal constraints, it just makes the job so much - maybe 'easier' isn't the right word, but because you know your boundaries, you can just play within those boundaries much more, so it's much more fun to do.

I'll often dream about characters before I start writing their stories.

Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.

The great thing about writing compared to life is getting to tie things up.

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

The written word is the basic of everything. Most important, the idea, and after that, the dialogue. You can rehash the dialogue as you go along, it 's disgraceful to have to do this, but now and again you have no choice.

When I was young, I assumed that authors must have traveled the world or done exotic things in order to tell great stories.

Whenever you deal with science fiction you are setting up a world of rules. I think you work hard to establish the rules. And you also have to work even harder to maintain those rules, and within that find excitement and unpredictability and all that stuff.

A work of fiction is conceived very much the same way as a dream occurs in the mind of a sleeper. But a lot of it is imagination. It's not based on real people.

I make things up for a living. It would be pretty boring to just fictionalize real people.

I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

Composing means you have a beginning, middle and end and a fluidity to what you're doing.

Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about.

I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories.

How many times can you put together 26 different stories without running out?

My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected.