Christopher Hitchens Quotes

Writers can take offense when someone asks what's real or autobiographical in our work because, to us, that's not what counts. The bits taken from life are tiny scales on the dragon's tail - what about that whole beautiful writhing, fire-breathing dragon?

From Shakespeare to Robi Thakur, everyone has written stories about people and incidents around them. There is no creativity minus reality irrespective of how flowery or abstract you make it.

I'll take a certain concern of my own or a situation and try to frame it around a fictional story, but sometimes just straight-up autobiographical songs work well, and sometimes a story is better. I like stories. I like to hear them. I don't think there are enough of them in songs anymore.

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

I love the feeling of creating pictures in someone's mind just by spelling out the right lyrical combination.

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It's endless. I'm sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds.

I'm just a storyteller.

When I was little, I made up my own fairy tales, and the ghostly echo of 'Once upon a time' shapes all the fiction I've ever written.

I always take a story that's kind of out there, like an urban myth. I take some possibility that people imagine, that they are familiar with, and try to turn it into a story.

I'm always interested in storytelling and whatever form that comes in.

I've never turned into a bee - I've never been chased by a mummy or met a ghost. But many of the ideas in my books are suggested by real life.

I've always said fantasy is sort of 'stealth philosophy'.

Fantasy is fantasy. It's fiction. It's not meant to be a textbook. I don't believe in letting research overwhelm the fiction. That's a danger of science fiction in particular, as opposed to fantasy. A lot of writers forget that what they're doing is supposed to be art.

Literature has always been the greatest fuel for my imagination.

I love the magic of stories and the power of stories.

I love playing with language and the rhythm of language - for some reason, this seems so much easier for me to do when I get to make things up than when writing nonfiction.

Fiction allows us to both evade truth and to approach it - or, rather, it's fiction that allows us to 'construct' our world. It's haunted by the unimaginable and the unspeakable.

I have these rhyme-based ideas because I love Julia Donaldson. 'The Snail and the Whale' is one of the most beautiful poems, and I feel like I could do that.

I don't have anything to prove as a writer anymore. I write about Panera Bread or Red Lobster or Satan or Richard Ramirez or whatever comes to mind. I just write.

I'm a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn't have access to previously.