Michael Ende Quotes

I think when I write movies and plays and books and magazine articles, they're all storytelling, and reality is the common denominator that binds them.

An idea might spark an essay, but never a story.

If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.

I started writing stories in my spare time.

I could come up with 50 stories that I am thinking about.

I'm a magpie in my fiction, taking whatever looks shiny and curious to line the nest of my story.

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

Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.

This basic thing I always do: 'What happened between the character's birth, and page one of the script?' Anything that's not in the story, I'll fill in the blanks.

Where story comes from, I don't know. I know that I become obsessed with something. An idea, an image, a person, the way a person talks. And then something starts happening that I can't explain, and it has a lot to do with language.

Sometimes, in certain stories, I think we know at the outset essentially what the tone is going to be, or it becomes important that we're groping toward some kind of story with a certain kind of tone that we both get somehow. But I don't think how that's combined with other elements is ever in any way overtly discussed.

Working within the limitations of the shared world generally made the writing easier, because I didn't have to invent any of the characters or background, which is usually the hardest part.

For me writing is an organic process that starts with engaging the language and then thinking about the structure of the novel as you move along. Especially in revision you start to notice correlations. Things come up, not self-consciously, because you're busy feeling your way through sentences and trying to push the language into new places.

I usually am thinking about my next book the second I put the last dot on the previous one that I turn in.

I don't really think in terms of genre, I think in terms of story and character.

If I can tell you the story from beginning to end in five minutes, I'm ready to start writing.

When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.

Plot and scene are still the hardest things for me, though I think they're the building blocks of what makes a story work.

A good story is like a bitter pill, with the sugar coating inside of it.

Don’t try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them.

I assemble stories-me and a hundred million other people-at the sentence level. Not by coming up with a sweeping story line.

I don't think I'm more of a screenwriter than I am a fiction writer. I'm more of a reader than a film-watcher, so I imagine that I'm not approaching fiction or films in a particularly cinematic way.

When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

A dependent clause (a sentence fragment set off by commas, dontcha know) helps you explore your story by moving you deeper into the sentence. It allows you to stop and think harder about what you've already written. Often the story you're looking for is inside the sentence. The dependent clause helps you uncover it.

Because I come from the theater, I use the images of the theater and of movies a great deal when I write. I see the story in my head. I have to break down the outline of a story first. I have to know where I'm going. Usually I have a good beginning and a good ending, and then I think, "Now I have to find my way through it."