Hayao Miyazaki Quotes

My favourite part of writing a book is thinking up the ideas, and that can start a long time before I actually sit down at my desk.

What I have to write, the story, it is always going on in my mind. What incidences I can add in the story - it is a continuous process.

I won't usually just sit down to write. I'd have done it in my head already. I visualise a story just like a film strip running in my head. I guess that is also a reason why my books have such a visual element to them. And it's what I tell young writers: plan your story ahead.

I don't stare at a sheet of paper and try to think of a good word to use. I try to see where the story should go.

I'm not like a Sears Catalog of ideas. I don't have that many ideas. I've more or less written them over the years. Usually, I come up with a situation or a character, and it rattles around in my head until the story or the plot emerges.

I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.

I start with an idea that is no more than a paragraph long, and expand it slowly into an outline. But I'm always surprised by the directions things take when I actually start writing.

I'm always writing. There is always a story brewing in my head.

I don't take notes. I don't have any notebooks. I keep on trying to do that because it seems like a very writerly thing to do, but my mind doesn't work that way. I tend to get the idea for a novel in a big splash.

Actually, after while, finding the ideas is the easy part. Sorting them through and turning them into stories, now, that's the hard work.

When I'm working on one book, part of my imagination is thinking ahead to the next one.

Rarely does a complete idea come to me. I basically start with just a small scene or a snatch of dialogue and force myself to write and to keep writing. Sometimes it becomes a book.

I think I always have many ideas for books in my head. It's like a forest full of mushrooms. Some are big, some are small.

For someone who wants to write a story, they should go on thinking about the story. When it comes up to a level, where it has reached your neck that's when you should go about writing it.

I keep my options open about my next story, there will always be those vague discussions at home.

I think it's important to say typing in the computer is like the last, last phase of my writing process. That's kind of the fun part. Well, it's all somewhat fun, I suppose. But usually what happens is I think about a movie for at least a year - maybe a couple more - and I don't put anything down.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.

I do see myself as someone who has a lot of story ideas.

Writing 'when you find me,' it really exposed me to a way of putting together a story I hadn't thought of.

The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it.