Anders Holm Quotes

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.

Once I'm given an idea for a story I have a million ideas on how it should be illustrated, but I don't have a big shoebox full of unfinished ideas.

I've never dreamed of a story idea. I have such boring dreams.

I think I always have many ideas for books in my head. It's like a forest full of mushrooms. Some are big, some are small.

Brainstorming, for me, takes place in my bed at night between the time I turn out my lights and I finally fall asleep. It is not a very violent storm, but what's happening is I am just thinking about different ideas and maybe things I've seen that day that I think might make a good story.

My favourite part of writing a book is thinking up the ideas, and that can start a long time before I actually sit down at my desk.

I take in a lot of stuff from real life, movies, television, news and it all gets mixed in my head and somehow turns into a story idea.

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

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.

My process is thinking, thinking and thinking - thinking about my stories for a long time.

My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.

I sometimes feel as if ideas for a novel kind of pop up like numbers in a bingo tumbler, and then they're ready to go.

I've always got maybe around four different titles in mind, maybe about four different ideas that I'd love to make.

Whenever I write a novel, most of the time it starts with barest slip of an idea.

I'm not a craftsman of graphics or art or film. I'm more of an idea generator and manufacturer.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

I don't stare at a sheet of paper and try to think of a good word to use. I try to see where the story should go.

At first, I see pictures of a story in my mind. Then creating the story comes from asking questions of myself. I guess you might call it the 'what if - what then' approach to writing and illustration.

I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.

When people find out that I've written 208 novels, they ask, 'How did you think of all that?' Well, I answer, 'How do you not think of it?' I see a gum wrapper on the ground, and I think, 'Oh, a Russian spy probably dropped that.' I just think like that, and those thoughts go through my mind constantly.

I find inspiration in many places. Sometimes music gives me the kernel of a story. Sometimes it's dissatisfaction with the plot of a movie or a book that gets me thinking. Sometimes it's love of a movie or book.

For me, I get a part of an idea here and a little bit of an idea there, and then finally it accumulates into a movie.

I really don't know what I am going to do in terms of what a book is going to be about until I actually start writing it!

I often have trouble falling asleep at night, so when I'm lying in bed I think up stories. That's where I do a lot of my thinking. I also get a lot of ideas while I'm reading - sometimes reading someone else's stories will make me think of one of my own.