Anthony Horowitz Quotes

I think the most important thing when you're telling a story is to just tell the story as best as you possibly can.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

Sometimes I read a script and it's obvious from early on that it's one where the suspension of disbelief has to develop strongly from page one. Some are more reality-based.

A work of fiction is conceived very much the same way as a dream occurs in the mind of a sleeper. But a lot of it is imagination. It's not based on real people.

The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.

My books aren't autobiographical.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

I'm always excited about stories that allow me to explore a character and create interesting stories and worlds that we haven't seen before.

I am really interested in storytelling in general - nothing is off-limits!

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.

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.

Obviously, I like to write stories that are page-turners. But I always try my very, very hardest to be as factually true as possible.

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

I'm writing about real things. Real people. Real characters. You have to believe what I write about is true or you wouldn't pay any attention at all. Sometimes it's me, or a composite of me and other people. Sometimes it's not me at all.

All fiction relies on the real world in the sense that we all take in the world through our five senses and we accumulate details, consciously or subconsciously. This accumulation of detail can be drawn on when you write fiction.

I came to the conclusion that I am not a fiction writer.

Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

A good scenario doesn't make a good science fiction story - but it's a setting within which a good science fiction story might be told.

In truth, even if they have an imperfect insight into their own methods, I still slightly mistrust writers of fiction who are assured literary critics; it makes me suspect that they favour the word over the world it should describe. Such scribes fall victim too easily to the solecism of equating style with morality.

I simply love writing good stories, that's my passion.

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

I think you can do a lot with fiction, and in some cases you can say even more in fiction than you can in straight-up documentary journalism.

I simply love writing good stories; that's my passion.