Patti Smith Quotes

The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

I'm a novelist who read a lot as a kid. When you grow up on books and then grow up to write books, famous authors are a lot more meaningful to you than TV and movie stars.

I suppose if I was to have to pick a few, Ursula LeGuin would have to top the list. It was while reading her work that I decided I wanted to be an author.

One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they're just infested with lots of stuff.

One of the first serious attempts I made to write a novel was when I was in Grade 6 and I had read 'Matilda.' I wrote my own version and my teacher had it bound and permitted me to read it to the class - cementing my love of reading, writing and Roald Dahl!

I find inspiration in many places. Sometimes music gives me the kernel of a story. Sometimes it's dissatisfaction with the plot of a movie or a book that gets me thinking. Sometimes it's love of a movie or book.

There wasn't much as a kid that inspired me in what I did as an adult, but I was always very interested in what motivates people, and in telling stories and building things.

I'm still driven by the feeling I had when I wrote my first book or read a Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle adventure.

I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That's my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me.

'Jurassic Park' and 'Star Wars' shoved me into loving sci-fi and film in general when I was a barely coherent 3-year-old. And 'Lord of the Rings' took me to another planet entirely. Before that series, I knew I loved writing, but after, I knew that I had to write.

I'm inspired by nonmusical things a lot, whether it's a film or a book or whatever.

I started writing stories when I was six years old. I was a very shy kid, extremely shy, and I had a fabulous first-grade teacher who told me to write.

I always envision myself being a Hemingway type.

A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts.

I always knew I wanted to write really imaginative fiction - fiction that was very different from my real life.

The thing that inspires me most is reading and just observing the people around me. I think those are the two things that make me want to write.

A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.

I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don’t. We never know. We just make stuff up.

One writes such a story [The Lord of the Rings] not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mold of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much personal selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one's personal compost-heap; and my mold is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.

There is always something of the writer in the work but I don't think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I've written, that would truly be an extraordinary story.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

To write a short story, you have to be able to stay up all night.

Writers spend too much time among dead things. I thought that was profound and actually true, that you're trying to pump life into something that is inanimate. You see what a sort of audacious thing it is to move these sort of imaginary people around in a very stylized and patterned world.