Charlotte Mary Yonge Quotes

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

Fiction is the most joyous, beautiful, sophisticated, wonderful thing in the world.

You're a writer. Make it up.

Research for fiction is a funny thing: you go looking for one piece of information, and find something altogether different.

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

I like writing historical fiction.

I don't separate my books into historical novels and the rest. To me, they're all made-up worlds, and both kinds are borne out of curiosity, some investigation into the past.

Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.

Read as much as you can, and then sit down and write.

History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.

I was so in love with books from as early as I remember that it seemed a natural step to want to create them. And so I just wanted to be a writer from a very young age. And I think that the lies were just a natural side effect of me wanting to tell stories and write them down.

I like learning things, and I like that writing comics is an excuse to look into new stuff and research and learn new things and hopefully put them in books.

If you're going to write, you're going to have to force yourself to really study the world.

Fantasy is fantasy. It's fiction. It's not meant to be a textbook. I don't believe in letting research overwhelm the fiction. That's a danger of science fiction in particular, as opposed to fantasy. A lot of writers forget that what they're doing is supposed to be art.

Writer advice... Write. Finish things. Go for walks. Read a lot & outside your comfort zone. Stay interested. Daydream. Write.

Being a writer of fiction isn't like being a compulsive liar, honestly.

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don’t you? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.

A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

I think it's really boring, from the point of view of the novelist, to write about yourself. Tedious. But that's very hard to explain to people who really don't believe in the possibility of invention.

It’s not just the adage ‘write what you know,’ it’s about gathering up all of the knowledge and experience you’ve collected up to now to help you dive into the things you don’t know.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

As a writer, it is always fun to imagine yourself in someone else's shoes.

Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.

I don't think I wrote stories down when I was young, but I certainly made them up, perhaps sometimes losing track of the border between reality and make-believe.