J. Courtney Sullivan Quotes

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

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.

You start as an audience member and create a world you're interested in, and then you move into the telling of those stories, bringing what has interested you as an audience member.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

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

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

I always think I know the way a novel will go. I write maps on oversized art pads like the kind I carried around in college when I was earnest about drawing. I need to have some idea of the shape of the novel, where its headed, so that I can proceed with confidence. But the truth is my characters start doing and saying things I don't expect.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.

To write a story, I think you really have to open yourself up to the world.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.

I write short stories when a little idea occurs to me, that I know isn't a part of a novel that will stand by itself and should be concentrated.

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.

I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself.

I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.

I'm looking forward to writing more novels for young adults.

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.

When I read 'Room,' I absolutely loved it, and I thought I knew how to make it.

I'm very interested in writing an actual series, that doesn't have too much to do with my music - a world I create that has characters in it. I'm just trying to get there by doing things that I want to do.