Leo Sayer Quotes

I write a lot in my head. I've never been driven to write things down.

I write on a visual canvas, 'seeing' a scene in my thoughts before translating it into language, so I'm a visual junkie.

All fiction becomes autobiographical when the author has true talent.

I just write the books that I think I would want to read.

I have never successfully written in the third person. If there's a rhythm or a musicality that interests me, I become obsessed with the character, and I just have this need to spend time with him or her. Sometimes I'll be in the park playing ball, and I'll hear a kid say something that I've never heard before. Sometimes one word can set me off.

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.

I put a lot of myself into my characters when I write.

Like, even when I speak, I think I speak the same way I write. I kind of see it a certain way, and it leads me to write it exactly how I'm seeing it.

You know, there's always someone in mind when I'm writing. You know, it's all comes from somewhere inside.

Each person has a literature inside them.

I use a stream-of-consciousness approach; if you don't censor yourself, you end up with what you're most concerned about, but you haven't filtered it through your conscious mind. Then you craft it.

Language for me narrates the pictures in my mind.

The way I write is that I'll actually have a conversation out loud with myself. In a weird way, I just kind of get schizophrenic and play two characters.

I don't really think about genre. I like to write books that I'd love to read myself.

When you write, it's just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with - though not the one you speak with. I think your writing voice is your laser-guided missile. It's the poetry part of you.

You have to write your own story, your own graph and rhythm.

Long ago, when I was in higher secondary school in Delhi, I read an essay by George Orwell in which he said there was a voice in his head that put into words everything he was seeing. I realised I did that, too, or maybe I started doing it in imitation.

A big reason I'd spent my career as a writer and not a public speaker is that I am a person who refines my worldview in a silent room, waiting for my thoughts to arrange themselves on the screen before me.

In my head I'm talking all the time.

In the most self-protective of ways, I don't think about the reader when I'm writing - I just think about the story.

My writing did turn out to be quite intact, as it has all my experiences gathered at one place.

Usually when I'm writing, I kind of know what it is before I start writing and I write stream of consciousness style.

When I sit down to write, I don't have any real goals except to follow one good sentence with another... I'm not the kind of writer who has a map.

I do enjoy the form of things. I enjoy finding the form that seems best to fit what I'm thinking about. I don't set out to find a bizarre way of writing.