Tawni O'Dell Quotes

I think you can do a lot with fiction, and in some cases you can say even more in fiction than you can in straight-up documentary journalism.

Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.

Fiction is my deepest love, but I love journalism, too. It keeps me thinking vigorously, and it reminds me that there is a world out there.

Getting the chance at 40 to make up stories that other people would draw and other people would then read is pretty weird.

I just feel so lucky to tell stories and make up stories and share them with people.

I can make up stories with the best of them. I've been telling stories since I was a little kid.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

I always wanted to use my newspaper background in a novel.

A notion for a story is for me a confluence of real events, historical perhaps, or from my own memory to create an exciting fusion.

I'll take a certain concern of my own or a situation and try to frame it around a fictional story, but sometimes just straight-up autobiographical songs work well, and sometimes a story is better. I like stories. I like to hear them. I don't think there are enough of them in songs anymore.

Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.

I don't care whether the story is real or fantastical. I tell the story that needs to be told.

I've always said I have one skill. That skill - if I have it at all - is storytelling.

I was never a good journalist, because I would make things up. A lot of people frowned on that, which is why I ended up in fiction.

First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.

All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.

Quite casually I wander into my plot, poke around with my characters for a while, then amble off, leaving no moral proved and no reader improved.

I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.

I write for the same reason I read: to find out what's going to happen.

Basically, I just write whatever story grabs me rather than considering the genre.

I can't remember a time when I didn't write or make up stories, because it seemed to come with reading.

The best writers who have put pen to paper have often had a journalism background.

I love telling stories. Creating a character, a world, a whole universe out of nothing. That part I can't get enough of.

It's all storytelling, you know. That's what journalism is all about.