Kelley Armstrong Quotes

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

I think many people would say that writers like Stephen King have hypergraphia.

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

When someone's a writer, it's very creative and moody, and you think of someone walking around the office in pajamas thinking of ideas.

I think that my passion for writing fantasy began at about the same time as my passion for reading fantasy.

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

Stephen King has inspired me with his humor and honesty, and his admonition that the author's job is to tell the truth.

It isn't as if a writer merely records life as it unfurls. Reality does not automatically transcribe as literature; real people are not shapely, compelling characters to be harvested. Charming facts and sharp observations rarely slide seamlessly into whatever narrative is at hand.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

The novelist in me is probably hiding behind all the stories I write, looking for ways to connect them and continue the conversation with readers. Maybe I'm writing one long narrative, and each book, however different from the last, is just a chapter.

When the narrative itself starts knocking on the glassed-in box that was your prescription for how you were going to write this novel... you have to listen to it.

I should tell you that many people think that authors just cut and paste from real life into books. It doesn't work quite that way.

The trick to being a novelist is to act like an iceberg. Make it seem as if you're displaying only one-tenth of what you know, and the other nine-tenths isn't visible and never mind if that part is pure styrofoam!

I try to write the kind of books I like to read.

You have to have empathy, knowledge and compassion for your characters if you're a writer.

You know, all writers are vampires and they'll look around and they watch you when you're not even thinking they're watching you and they'll slip stuff in.

I love to tell stories and this is my way of getting them down on paper.

To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

When I read good stories, I want to write good stories too.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

I'm a believer in using whatever works for fiction, but mostly, that's not life.