Catherine Jinks Quotes

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

My work has always dealt with a kind of space that allows one to daydream.

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.

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.

I'm a daydreamer.

I loved the world of imagination.

I don't have many friends. It's not because I'm a misanthrope. It's because I'm reserved. I'm self-contained. I get all my adventures in my head when I'm writing my books.

I always had an awful lot going on in my head, always telling myself stories, very vivid imagination.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

I just enjoyed telling stories. I enjoyed watching films and reading and becoming someone else. I spent a lot of time on my own when I was younger; I enjoyed my own company and still do, so it was a source of escapism.

My greatest strength as a child, I realize now, was my imagination. While every other kid was reading and writing, I had seven whole hours a day to practice my imagination. When do you get that space in your life, ever?

My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings.

I think I write about things that are mysterious to me.

Indolence, of course, is an absolutely crucial part of the creative process: you do not find poets sitting in rows in cavernous word factories, staring at screens. They are rather to be found lolling on the sofa or strolling through the groves, nursing their melancholic temperaments and losing themselves in extended reveries.

Part of a writer's job is just spacing out, looking into the air and imagining things.

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

I was quite shy. I used to write stories all the time, and I think that was a worry for my parents.

The process of being a writer is much more interior than being a scientist, because science is so reactionary.

At school, I was always daydreaming and fiddling in inkwells, but I had to learn to grow up and become articulate. And doing that was what brought me into writing songs. It's like therapy for me, because it exposes what I'm really thinking.

A story in your head isn't a story. It's just a daydream until you actually write it down. So write it down.

My idea of fun is to sit looking at a blank wall in a cottage, making up stories in utter silence. The thought of going back to work in an office is horrendous.

Writing is an amazing place to hide, to go into the rabbit hole, and pull the trap door down over your head.

I fantasised about becoming an author and wrote my first book at 18 - an introspective novel set in the 1920s.

I played a lot of dress-up in my room. I really liked being alone. I had a lot of friends, but I had an only-child, live-in-my-head personality.

I have never been able to pay attention to anything for more than a few minutes - the stories in my head have always been so much more entertaining. Only books could pull me out of my own imagination, and then it was only to plunge me into someone else's.