Wilbur Smith Quotes

When I write, it's like watching a movie in my head.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

I actually feel that the different kinds of stories come out of different parts of my brain.

Everything I've written I see in a very precise way and I hear in my inner ear.

Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders.

For me, the whole process involves envisioning this book in my head as I'm working.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

I consider the process of gestation just as important as when you're actually sitting down putting words to the paper.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

I think when I'm drawing, I'm seeing what's happening on the page almost as if it were unfolding like a movie in my head.

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

Once I'm given an idea for a story I have a million ideas on how it should be illustrated, but I don't have a big shoebox full of unfinished ideas.

When I sit down to write, I know everything I need to know... I start writing, and within 30 seconds or 60 seconds, I'm watching a movie. I'm not making this stuff up; the characters are acting it out, and I'm just writing it down.

When I write, my brain moves faster than my hands so I'm always trying to picture things.

I try not to picture a reader when I'm writing. It's like trying to make a great table but not picturing anybody sitting at it.

I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it.

Writers divide fairly cleanly into those who only work through what they hear and those who are more visual. I am the latter, where I lie down on my office floor and play scenes through my head to - cinematically, several times with different elements - to see what works. I can't write a scene until I can see it.

My process is thinking, thinking and thinking - thinking about my stories for a long time.

I pick up my pen. It flows. A building appears. There it is. There is nothing more to say.

The soul never thinks without a picture.

I have trouble writing if I can't picture how things are going to look.

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

When I'm working on one book, part of my imagination is thinking ahead to the next one.