Edward P. Jones Quotes

I love telling stories. Creating a character, a world, a whole universe out of nothing. That part I can't get enough of.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

I prefer writing originals.

I think the idea of creating a character from scratch, one that has not been done in a novel or an existing story, is immensely exciting, terrifying and ultimately rewarding.

With me, writing is 60% imagination, 30% people you know and 10% you don't know where it comes from.

The truth is that every writer, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, is trying to write something truly original and that's what I think I'm doing.

I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.

I'm not one of those authors who claims to hear voices in my head or 'let the characters speak through me,' whatever that might mean.

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

For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.

For me, inspiration isn't a sort of spark which lights the fire of the story. It's more like a thread, one of many, which you can tease out of a story once it's written, if you feel so inclined.

I just write the books that I think I would want to read.

A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

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.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

I don't actually have a one wellspring of inspiration. Though I'm most often inspired while reading - both fiction and nonfiction.

The characters emerge from my rather twisted mind. That's another enjoyable part of the job making stuff up.

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

For a writer it's a dream to sit and watch people as close as possible.

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

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 love stories. I just enjoy telling stories and watching what these characters do - although writing continues to be just as hard as it always was.

Writing is a mysterious process, and many ideas come from deep within the imagination, so it's very hard to say how characters come about. Mostly, they just happen.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.