Scarlett Thomas Quotes

The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.

I'm just a story teller.

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

I would like to use stories as a springboard for children to make their own creative responses. I would like to encourage them to express themselves using music, art, film or whatever, and upload it to a website having been inspired by particular stories.

Sri Lanka is a part of my background: it's not where I live, but it's what I want to explore. And I find it works very well to explore through fiction.

I've always liked the idea that writing is a form of travel. And I started my writing career as a mystery novelist for adults.

I'd probably play games obsessively if I didn't write, although I admit I don't read novels partly because I don't enjoy it, not just because it's the wrong side of the creator-consumer barrier for me. I'm a visual writer. I think in moving 3D images and write down what I observe.

I envisioned that as my life: staying in academia to make a living and then taking summers off to write my novels.

I like to think of myself as a storyteller.

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.

Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.

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

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully.

A writer should bury his thoughts deep and convey them through the characters in his novel.

I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.

I think of myself as a storyteller, and that is it.

I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.

Novels can be a snapshot of a moment in time, or several moments in time, and as a reader, that's what I really like, and as a writer, it's what I'm drawn to also.

I have an uncomfortable groove, 'cause I have a lot of different kinds of stories to tell.

Being a novelist, you can roam around with a story and indulge yourself.

I want to be remembered as a storyteller.

To me, there is nothing higher than fiction. Nothing. It is fundamentally who I am. I am a teller of stories. For me, that's the only way I can make sense of the world, with all the dance that it involves.

With novels, you're representing things. You're not explaining.

Telling a story is an emotional and personal experience for me and I can't do without it.