Amy Waldman Quotes

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 just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.

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

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.

A lot of things that I write about have happened to people around me, if not necessarily to me or in the organizations I've worked in. Having said that, it's fiction and has a lot to do with my imagination and creativity.

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

As writers, our job is to try to create, in a fake space, something that feels true. That's just straight-up fiction: Invent a character that doesn't exist; make them seem like they do.

There's a huge distance between who I am as a regular person and what takes place in my fiction.

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.

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

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.

The characters emerge from my rather twisted mind. That's another enjoyable part of the job making stuff up.

The great thing about writing is that you always put yourself in the shoes of the character. If you're doing it right, you can see into the heart of all your characters. Usually, when there's a writing problem, it's because you aren't doing that.

As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness.

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

I've written fiction for as long as I can remember; it's always been my preferred form of play.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

I think the idea of creating a character from scratch, one that has not been done in a novel or an existing story, is immensely exciting, terrifying and ultimately rewarding.

Novels will remain my meat and potatoes, what sustain me imaginatively.

I don't really set out to explore grand themes. I set out to tell a story. And one I have to be able to imagine right through.

I've never been comfortable with the idea of using family and friends in stories. Which is why it takes me longer than something else. Because you make them up out of nothing. Doing that is harder.

You have to have empathy, knowledge and compassion for your characters if you're a writer.

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.

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