Virginia Woolf Quotes

I don't care whether the story is real or fantastical. I tell the story that needs to be told.

Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth.

A few people have tried to make me see that my writing isn't quite their thing by saying to me: 'What about realism?' To which my general response is, 'What about it?' However, I wouldn't be at all surprised if one of my favorite writers, Marilynne Robinson, was to say something similar if asked 'What about the fantastic?'

I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.

Only in a novel are all things given full play.

The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play.

A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.

I prioritise story over science, but not at the expense of being really stupid about it.

I think it's fun to play with worlds that you can add a lot of your own imagination to. With 'True Blood,' you're not limited by anything, there are just leaps and bounds of the imagination you can take with these characters.

Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen.

The great thing about fiction is you can fix things and make things better.

I kind of write in my own little world.

Literature invents its own rules.

I should say, I don't write about myself or my life. So for me, in fiction, it's always been about what I can dream up, that feels far away from me.

When you do fiction, it is your imagination you have put out there.

As a small child, I could watch anything happen and tell a story, and it was funny.

In my mind, there's not a great difference between what people call fiction and non-fiction. So in that sense, I'm like an early-18th-century person. I actually believe there's one way of writing.

When reading fiction, we cannot automatically assume that what we read is fact.

I like writing about places, about people and environments. When I create a world, it lets me go in and define the details of that world.

Sometimes, in a fictional story, you can be more honest and truthful, actually. As a journalist, you're a prisoner of the data, in effect. You have to tell the story with evidence you can verify.

I like to live in my own mind, regardless of everyone and everything, working out the intimate puzzles that are my stories and novels.

If I feel like I haven't really tapped into the essence of the story when I do an assignment, I may revisit it on my own, and that's when I feel freer to add my imagination. But I think that if you feel imaginatively towards a subject, you really shouldn't do it in a journalistic context, because then you're just fabricating, and that's crazy.

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

I am really interested in storytelling in general - nothing is off-limits!

I'm not interested in writing overtly autobiographical songs. I would rather explore interesting stories. I like the idea of the songs being evocative and distinctive, so I have in my mind the atmosphere that a film could evoke. I like to think of them existing in their own little world.