Stephanie Laurens Quotes

Every bit of our lives revolves around how we get from one place to another and how long it's going to take to get there and what time of day you have to leave to do it.

Creating a believable world on the ship was very important, and technically they got better and better and better at showing the ship too.

If I'm going to Kilburn, I get on a bus.

Nothing affects people's lives who go in and out of New York more than their commute. It is unavoidable, and it must be done every day.

The kind of dystopian books that I've always loved the most are the ones where you find yourself in a world that's less scorched-earth and instead a world that has just been made different.

We are writing fiction, but we are trying to create a world that's believable.

Time spent travelling was assumed to be unproductive and a monetary value attributed to the minutes that would be saved from a speedier journey that allowed people to get from one office to another more quickly. I've always thought that that case was weak.

You can easily say, 'I can go 56', but how are you going to do that?

The benefit of having a story that takes place in the real world is that you don't have to invent the real world. It exists.

I bloody love transport and plotting a route through London.

The back roads of America are so important.

The best thing about my house is that I live five minutes from the airport, and since I fly more than I drive, it saves me a lot of time.

It's so much harder than it looks - to conjure a fictional world that some passing wolf of skepticism can't just blow down in one breath.

I don't feel beholden to follow the real world at all. The important thing is to know WHY things turned out the way they did. You need to understand the reasons for events, or at least be able to make reasonable guesses about them.

Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true.

I want to go to someone's world. I'll buy it if the world is full of zombies - I'll live there if you give me a strong enough vision of what that world looks like.

The most hopeful thing in the stories, I hope, is wit. I make it up. If I make up a world in which we're ruled by big talking turds, it doesn't mean that we are. So you shouldn't feel depressed.

As a reader, I want a book to kidnap me into its world. Its world must make my so-called real world seem flimsy. Its world must lure me to return. When I close the book, I should feel bereft.

How long would it take a school-inspector of average activity to tumble head over heels from London toYork?

In brief, worldbuilding is different than setting in my opinion. Setting is a room. A backdrop. It's scenery. But without good worldbuilding, you can't have realistic feeling scenery. You can't have cool, unique backdrops for your story.

People say there's delays on flights. Delays, really? New York to California in five hours, that used to take 30 years, a bunch of people used to die on the way there, have a baby, you would end up with a whole different group of people by the time you got there. Now you watch a movie and [go to the toilet] and you're home.

The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.

The danger in writing about a world you don't know very well is that you can get lost in it, and sometimes I'll end up with a hundred pages I don't know what to do with.

Our impatience of miles, when we are in a hurry; but it is still best that a mile should have seventeen hundred and sixty yards.

One of the beauties of being an artist is that you can create a whole new world, with circumstances that are better in your invented world than they are in the real world.