Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

As a child, I was fortunate enough to be close to family members who were - and still are - great storytellers. I was a gullible country boy from Rocky Mount, Virginia, and I believed every folktale they told me, no matter how fantastic.

It's impossible for me to disentangle how much of my storytelling urge is the product of growing up with novelist parents and how much is a genetic legacy from those same parents.

Most of my characters are an amalgamation of people that I've met, my family, or myself. Being a writer, you can draw only from what you know. I am lucky to have really rich and interesting people in my family for, you know, interesting family nights and great characters.

I come from quite a creative family; everyone's just doing their own thing!

I'm really the only artist in my family. I have one cousin who is a painter. I think I developed all of that from television and books - from being, essentially, an only child. I'm my mom's only child and my dad's fourth child, but separated by 14 years.

My dad is a Jack Nicholson lookalike and a frustrated performer, my mother's into reading and poetry. I suppose the thing I owe them most is my confidence.

I never thought about what I would write. I just come from such a big family of storytellers.

My sister's a musician. Everyone else in our family, it's either academics or artists of one kind or another. And those are the people that I think I like to hang out with, too. I think, you know, they're always interesting; they lead interesting lives, and I think they're important for everyone to read about because everyone is an artist in a way.

There are a lot of funny people in my family. Absolutely. There were a lot of jokes growing up around the dinner table, for sure. We didn't grow up in a creative family.

The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

I grew up in a show business family, so we've always had a great sense of balance, being so close to my parents.

My parents weren't at all in entertainment, but when I look back, something along the line prepared me and opened me up to entertainment.

I grew up in an atmosphere where words were an integral part of culture.

My mother was a piano teacher, my father an inventor. He invented the reflective paint they still use on airstrips. They had faith in my ambition, and I think that made all the difference.

On a personal level, there are many people who have meant a great deal to me. My father and mother were certainly of vital importance, not only in themselves but because they created a world for me to revolt against.

My mother was a schoolteacher and very, very encouraging. She understood what it meant when I said I wanted to be a writer; both me and my brother wrote.

People would go from village to village with their books in a time of poverty and disease. They would get people around them, and for an hour, these storytellers would change people's lives. I'd always thought I was a reincarnation of that. That's who I want to be.

My father was a TV scriptwriter. He would perform his dialogue out loud, while my mum transcribed it at the typewriter. So I grew up thinking that plucking characters out of the air was an extremely normal way to behave.

We're always aware of our family being creative, but it wasn't like, 'My uncle is an amazing actor; I want to be like that.'

People ask me all the time if I'm from a family of writers. The literal short answer is no, but my father and his brothers and sisters and his mother are all people who would sit around with a Tom Collins and tell stories that seemed to get better and better each time they told them.

Children accept their world as the world. I grew up like kids that I went to school with. Their parents were either shrinks or actors.

I don't expect to be another Walt Disney, but I do get a terrific bang out of being able to say things with pictures. Maybe that means something deep and profound about me - but I doubt it.

Environment does shape you. My environment, in a pit family, in a pit village, with nine kids in total.

I don't have family in this business. I had two parents that loved me, that worked 24-7, and this is what instilled hard work in me. So you hear the stories about my upbringing, my religion.

I belong to a teachers' family and writing was my expression.