Guillermo del Toro Quotes

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

Every author that creates is a liar;literature is a lie,but from that lie, a recreation of reality is born. Therefore, recreating reality is one of the fundaments of creation.

First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.

Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.

A writer is an artist. They're creating things out of thin air.

The art of writing fiction is to sail as dangerously close to the truth as possible without sinking the ship

Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.

All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

Writing fiction is a good way to inhabit other minds, if not other lives.

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

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

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

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 writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

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

Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!

If I write a fantastic story, I'm not writing something willful. On the contrary, I am writing something that stands for my feelings, or for my thoughts. So that, in a sense, a fantastic story is as real and perhaps more real than a mere circumstantial story. Because after all, circumstances come and go, and symbols remain.

Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

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.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.

Writers can take offense when someone asks what's real or autobiographical in our work because, to us, that's not what counts. The bits taken from life are tiny scales on the dragon's tail - what about that whole beautiful writhing, fire-breathing dragon?