Rebecca Solnit Quotes

We are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us.

As far as the writing goes, I started telling stories as soon as I could talk, and started writing them down as soon as I could string words together.

So you want another story?" Uhh... no. We would like to know what really happened." Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?" Uhh... perhaps in English. In Japanese a story would have an element of invention in it. We don't want any invention. We want the 'straight facts,' as you say in English." Isn't telling about something--using words, English or Japanese--already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.

The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life.

Good dialogue is very important.

Prose is all about embellishing and describing.

Reading taught me how to write.

I've never written a children's book, but when people meet me for the first time and I say I write books, they invariably reply, 'Children's books?' Maybe it's something about my face.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

The ability to write and read books is one of the things that transformed us as a species.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

Stories always seem to get better with age.

Telling your story out loud is the way human beings communicate. We don't normally think up words, translate how to spell them and then move our fingers up and down over this randomly arranged set of keys to make the same letters appear on a screen.

Everything is a narrative in life. I learned that early on as a reporter at the 'Washington Post.'

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

For me, there is urgency in fiction, even though writing is, in itself, an act against the corrosiveness of time.

If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code.

I like the challenge of creating a world with only sentences.

Time is what allows stories to spread into people's consciousness.

The possibilities are infinite with new writing; every time you open a new script, there's no limit to what it might contain.

Writing and telling are almost the same, the way I do it.

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

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

You can't be a storyteller and a speechwriter at the same time.