Humphrey Bogart Quotes

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

I like being a storyteller. I'm bored with myself; I like to write about others. I have a lot of names in my songs: Karen, Margaret, Mary Kay. Even if it's about me, I want to put it through someone else. The music is the soundtrack to the story.

I wanted always to be a storyteller of the fullest expression.

I guess I'm just inspired to tell stories.

What is the difference between the novelist and the liar? At some moments, I have often wondered.

I've sort of always been obsessed with telling stories and making things up.

My life isn't very racy or exciting so I make things up, tell stories. I like telling stories.

Fiction is organized gossip.

I take inspiration from my life but only twenty per cent is real the rest is all made up.

It’s not a lie. It’s a gift for fiction.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

Fiction is of the essence of poetry as well as of painting; there is a resemblance in one of human bodies, things, and actions which are not real, and in the other of a true story by fiction.

The scientist needs an artistically creative imagination.

What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

Everything in the world was about creativity: belief and creation. Storytelling was the essence of both.

I think it's really boring, from the point of view of the novelist, to write about yourself. Tedious. But that's very hard to explain to people who really don't believe in the possibility of invention.

Whether it's fiction or nonfiction, writing takes me to another world.

Storytelling is my passion, and it rises from a love of reading.

I just went and got an agent because I thought I can create my own world - you can't right your own life, but you can escape to a world where you can have control.

Surely the job of fiction is to actually tell the truth. It's a paradox that's at the heart of any kind of storytelling.

Writing stories is the habit of lying put to good use.

I have written stories since I was a child.