Ian Somerhalder Quotes

What's funny about that is when I was writing Twilight just for myself and not thinking of it as a book, I was not thinking about publishing, and yet at the same time I was casting it in my head. Because when I read books, I see them very visually.

Reading changed dreams into life and life into dreams.

I don't start writing a script until I can see it all in my head, then it's a matter of getting it down in white heat.

I am not an analytical writer. Once I flesh out my characters and decide on the elements of my plot, the story unfolds in my head almost as though it was a movie reel.

Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.

Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.

Books stay with me and have shaped me and made huge impacts on my life.

'The Indian Runner' was easy. It had been incubating in me for eight years, and by the time I sat down to write the thing, I had all the pictures in my head.

People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints.

Stories develop from things I read and also from my own experiences and experiences of people I know.

With directing, you've got to find something and drag it up from its inception, and I'm at the early stages of doing that again. There's something all-consuming and addictive about that.

The best way to enhance a child's imagination is to make them read.

Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.

For me, I get a part of an idea here and a little bit of an idea there, and then finally it accumulates into a movie.

There isn't an aspect of book creation I don't enjoy, and there has always been a book in my life to dream about or work on.

When I make a movie, I have both a specific and vague, amorphous dream idea of what the movie is going to be. Of course, I don't actually know what it's going to be, but I'm still striving to get to some place with it.

'The Lion' all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, 'Let's try to make a story about it.'

When you're drawing something, you kind of run a movie in your head. You might close your eyes or stare into the distance and kind of see a movie unfolding and, you know, grab a certain moment or think, 'Oh, yeah, that's when we need just the point that he appears around the corner but just as she's getting into the car,' you know?

Every so often when I'm writing, a character might actually be a distinct person in my head - often not an actor or a face, literally a person who just seems to exist in my imagination. Then the challenge is finding somebody who is close enough to that to make me feel like I've ended up where I wanted to be.

Once I'm given an idea for a story I have a million ideas on how it should be illustrated, but I don't have a big shoebox full of unfinished ideas.

To some extent, I draw on what I see around me; in other places, I imagine what I write.

People have asked me a lot, 'What comes first? The pictures or the story? The story or the picture?' It's hard to describe because often they seem to come at the same time. I'm seeing images while I'm thinking of the story.

My books come to me in images, and sometimes the image is at the beginning of the book, and sometimes it's simply a flash somewhere in the middle.

It's funny, because what happens to me when I read a script, when something grabs hold of me, I start getting these flashes of people or places or things or images.

I sometimes think that what I do as a writer is make a kind of colouring book, where all the lines are there, and then you put in the colour.