Joe Shuster Quotes

As a novelist, you have to be free. Books can't be an act of filial duty.

Writing fantasy lets me imagine a great deal more than, say, writing about alligators, and lets me write about places more distant than Florida, but I can tell you things about Florida and alligators, let you make the connection all on your own.

Being an author is fun. It's a great job, because I can stay up as late as I want, and if I feel like taking the day off, I do it. Plus, I get to make up silly stories and draw pictures all day.

Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.

The people who are writing online and the people in my genre of creative non-fiction exert a great deal more freedom that journalists are allowed to exert in their day-to-day work.

Novelists should be free to write whatever they want, to let their imaginations roam as close to or as removed from reality as they see fit.

I'm not against anything that anybody might want to try to pull off in fiction. Fiction writing has to, at least, always represent a possibility of absolute freedom.

New York is the place that made my and other artists' dreams come true by giving us a chance to realise our ideas and concepts. It was a great place for making a presentation of artistic creation.

It's easier for me to write certain character types because of my own life experiences, but I find it too artistically limiting to only write about red-headed kids who grew up in small town Montana. That's really part of the fun of fantasy, I think. Our imagination is basically unlimited. Okay, that's a terrifying thing about fantasy, too.

Early on my career, I figured out that I just have to write the book I have to write at that moment. Whatever else is going on in the culture is just not that important. If you could get the culture to write your book, that would be great. But the culture can't write your book.

For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent.

I never accepted why there should be some invisible, wavy cutoff line separating Great Fiction from phosphorescent beauties and dollhouse miniatures, novels that contain a whole world in a snow globe.

The great thing about this thing we call art is that it has no rules.

My favorite thing is being able to follow my inspiration, and the freedom of being a writer is hard to beat.

I love writing, but I have that E. E. Cummings idea that as long as you stay inside the rules of your own world, it doesn't matter what it is.

I was encouraged to be imaginative and read, and it was a great childhood for a budding writer because I had the time and the freedom to go into a world of my own.

Art is not predictable. Art is not golf, as great as that may be. There are 360 degrees of choice to make.

I think, like any artist or any writer, I just want to have that pure freedom of expression and of thought - the freedom to explore and move in unexpected ways.

The most amazing gift about being a novelist is that you get to pursue your curiosity every day.

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

I think the fundamental thing about writing fiction is that you write what interests you and what inspires you. It can't be forced. I see no need to write about anything else or any other type of world.

Never forget that the truest luxury is imagination, and that being a writer gives you the leeway to exploit all of the imagination's curious intricacies, to be what you were, what you are, what you will be, and what everyone else is or was or will be, too.

When I lock myself up to write, I cannot allow myself to think about the censor or the reviewer or anyone but my characters and their story!

My imagination can do whatever it wants to do. This gives me a great sense of freedom.

I'm not going to lie; the most fun of writing these books is just saying, 'Where am I going to write about? Let me go there!'