Eric Jerome Dickey Quotes

Authors make stuff up. Let's not pretend it's any more magical than that.

I like writing about places, about people and environments. When I create a world, it lets me go in and define the details of that world.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

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.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.

I read a lot of fiction.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

I'm a believer in using whatever works for fiction, but mostly, that's not life.

I am a huge fan of world-building. I love doing it in my own books, and I love reading it done well.

That's the most amazing thing about writing, whether it's in prose or comics: that you can create something from nothing, and suddenly they come to life, like they've always been there.

When you do fiction, it is your imagination you have put out there.

I wanted to learn about the worlds I wanted to write about in fiction.

In my experience, a novel is the culmination of various thoughts and impressions collected over time, until something comes along to give them a shape, to turn them into a story.

I like to read fiction.

I believe any fiction writer is inspired by real life.

The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

To tell a good story and to illuminate the world: the two things are completely linked. That is the point. That is what I've always wanted to do.

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

It isn't as if a writer merely records life as it unfurls. Reality does not automatically transcribe as literature; real people are not shapely, compelling characters to be harvested. Charming facts and sharp observations rarely slide seamlessly into whatever narrative is at hand.