Jim Woodring Quotes

I'm a believer in using whatever works for fiction, but mostly, that's not life.

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories.

Ever since I was young, 14 or 15, I wondered if you could write a book that combined the visceral thrill of watching a movie with the total immersion you feel when you're inside a good book. And I had some success as a screenwriter before I began writing books.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

Most fiction comes from your experience.

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.

I actually enjoy writing longer books because you have even more to get your storytelling teeth into.

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

What we know about writing the novel is the novel.

I started writing when I was 26, so I don't even know what year that was. I wrote a script for me to star in. A friend of mine, who was an actor that I would compete against a lot, had written a script and was taking all these meetings. He just kept pushing me and was like, "You got to do it. You're going to love it!" He's a very successful screenwriter now. His name is Michael Bacall and he wrote 21 Jump Street, Project X, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. So it was a few factors.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.