Stephen Malkmus Quotes

When I'm writing, I'm creating the story and its character with words. I'm thinking about what the pictures will be like, but I never begin to sketch. The pictures are all in my head.

A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once.

I'm not a teacher; I'm not a historian. I'm trying to create a world for my characters.

To write a story is to create a world of your own.

I do take this insane pleasure in world-building. I get the world in my head, but I have to make sure everyone else gets it.

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

Setting is my primary joy as a writer, building a world and watching people respond to it.

I write both fiction and nonfiction. I begin my fiction with the main character. The story comes later.

I love telling stories. Creating a character, a world, a whole universe out of nothing. That part I can't get enough of.

I like to think of myself as a storyteller.

In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.

I find my characters and stories in many varied places; sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts, lively dinner party conversations and some even crawl out of the dusty remote recesses of my imagination.

I never thought I could write fiction.

In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me.

If you're a writer, you know that the stories don't come to you - you have to go looking for them. The old men in the lobby: that's where the stories were.

Most fiction comes from your experience.

I write fiction. I make things up, it's what I do.

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.

To me, novels are a trip of discovery, and you discover things that you don't know and you assume that many of your readers don't know, and you try to bring them to life on the page.

It's really, always, the story and the characters that come first, and the other things are kind of dealt with in time or, in fact, driven by the story.

I've always written about other artists, or I write my thoughts down, but I've never written a story.

I try to imagine the scenes as I'm writing them as if I were watching them play like a film.

I had originally been looking at writing, including fiction.

I will never write fiction.

If we got writing assignments in English class to make up a story, that was when the glimmer of creativity popped out. That was way more interesting to me than writing down my life details.