Isabella Rossellini Quotes

I always have a book that I use that somehow inspires my novels.

I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with 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.

When I read 'Room,' I absolutely loved it, and I thought I knew how to make it.

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

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

I have always loved story - I escaped within it as a child, I read every day, I love figuring out the complex layers of an author's work.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.

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 don't know that any writing comes easily, but I certainly get more immersed in novels. I don't think the routine is any different, but fiction tends to pull me further away from my life. When I'm deep in a novel, I don't pay bills and I walk around in one shoe, drinking two-day old coffee, and calling my kids by the wrong names.

Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.

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

I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.

I read a lot of fiction.

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

I think the reason I'm a writer is because first, I was a reader. I loved to read. I read a lot of adventure stories and mystery books, and I have wonderful memories of my mom reading picture books aloud to me. I learned that words are powerful.

Linda Svendsen's 'Marine Life' was important. I was nearly 22. Larry Mathews discussed the book in a creative writing class. We examined her stories, figured out how they worked.

I feel like I'm a natural-born playwright, but the prose thing has always mystified me. How to keep it going? How do people do it, for years and years?

In my experience, a novel is the culmination of various thoughts and impressions collected over time, until something comes along to give them a shape, to turn them into a story.

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.

Authors make stuff up. Let's not pretend it's any more magical than that.

I had originally been looking at writing, including fiction.

I like to read fiction.

I'm very much a word-centric writer, and that comes from the literature and the reading that I did as kid and also the films and mythology and stories.