Brent Weeks Quotes

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I'm still awake. I can continue yesterday's dream today, something you can't normally do in everyday life.

I always say that, for me, writing a book is like a wacky Greyhound bus trip - I know where I'm starting and where I'll end up, but I have no idea what will happen along the way.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

I hate thinking about writer's block! I don't have writer's block much, knock on wood, but if I do, I think it's usually because I haven't done enough research and am therefore unable to create a fully realized world.

I find that it's really important for me to imagine characters and situations. That allows me a lot of freedom.

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

I get ideas for my books from people I know and what happens to them, from places I've been and what happens to me, and from things I read.

When I started writing and illustrating, I knew little of classic children's literature. My stories came from real life, from my concerns about what was happening in the world.

I feel like reading really defined me as a writer because I lived my life outside of my own body for so much of my life and I loved it. I've always been a reader. I think living all those stories served me to naturally take that next step to creating.

I was writing fantasy as soon as I could hold a pen.

A lot of things that I write about have happened to people around me, if not necessarily to me or in the organizations I've worked in. Having said that, it's fiction and has a lot to do with my imagination and creativity.

I've always loved massive worlds, whether in fantasy or science fiction. I like the idea of making my own rules as well as utilizing everything that I love or inspires me. It's very freeing to know you can write a story that can be as big as your own imagination.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

I try not to repeat a story. I try not to repeat an emotion. I want it to be all sort of new for the viewers and to challenge myself as a writer, so there's always pressure. What else can you come up with?

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

How much research I have to do depends on the nature of the story. For fantasy, none at all.

I sort of love reading the scripts and going, 'Oh wow, what a great idea. I never would have thought of that.'

Blank paper has always inspired me.

I think writers are observers and watchers. We always have our ears open and eyes open, so I might see something in everyday life that inspires me. And I think that's probably more than anything else. Everyday life is where I get my inspiration.

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

Stories come to me and I don't know where they come from, but afterwards I can look back and say, 'Oh yes, that's got a little bit of me, or a little bit of my own son in it'. That's where ideas come from.

My feeling is that writing Fantasy should be harder - not easier - than writing any other kind of fiction.

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

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