Virginia Woolf Quotes

I think stories get better the more people try to amuse themselves.

I started writing stories in my spare time.

I'm a magpie in my fiction, taking whatever looks shiny and curious to line the nest of my story.

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

I think that a good movie creates its own world, and that world needn't refer to anything that's real. If it's consistent, if it's entertaining, if it's interesting, it justifies its being there.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

The importance and influence of books on me has been cumulative: the result of hearing and reading lots of stories about interesting people and places.

In journalism, a fact is just a fact. But in fiction, you have to build your case. It has to be made, step by step.

Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.

I grew up loving books and stories. Reading became my favourite pastime, and you have to be a reader before you can be a writer.

When you write something you know, you're making a story that will work, whether or not there's bits taken. It's always funny to me when people say, 'Well, it's clearly autobiographical,' and I say, 'Well, how do you know my autobiography?' Certainly, there are things that are connected, but I just think it's a very interesting assumption.

Fairy tales and folk tales are part of the DNA of all stories and great fun to write.

You see it in the stuff I've done at Laika: I've always tried to make movies that have an artful blend of darkness and light, intensity and warmth. That have a thinking brain and a strong beating heart at the centre of it.

I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).

I think both you and I, we live in a world of fiction and stories.

Arithmetic is the death of story.

I assemble stories-me and a hundred million other people-at the sentence level. Not by coming up with a sweeping story line.

When I start to write, I see my stories as a kind of movie. For instance, I ask myself, "What kind of opening do I want for this book?"

Writers who can't invent stories often substitute style for narrative. They remind me of the painter who couldn't paint people, so he painted chairs.

I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.

When I first decided I wanted to be a writer, when I was 10, 11 years old, the books that I loved obviously and openly fit that description: They came with maps and glossaries and timelines - books like Lord Of The Rings, Dune, The Chronicles Of Narnia. I imagined that's what being a writer was: You invented a world, and you did it in a very detailed way, and you told stories that were set in that world.

I used my daughter's crayons for each main character. One end of the wallpaper was the beginning of the story, and the other end was the end, and then there was all that middle part, which was the middle.

I've realized that in all the great stories, even if there's a happily-ever-after ending, there's something sad.

The situation comes first...the characters...come next...[then] begin to narrate.

Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write stories.