Christopher Eccleston Quotes

I've still got lots of writing in me. I have not left journalism, but I put it on hold to focus on acting. I love actors. I think it's a crazy thing to do with your life, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for them.

When I graduated college I needed to make money while I was pursuing acting, so I read screenplays and made a living writing coverage on them for studios.

I've been a screenwriter for twenty-five years. Every one of my books have been optioned for movies and I have written a few of those screenplays.

Acting is my first love and I want to stick to it. But I would be happy to offer my inputs to a script, if asked.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

Books are great for if you want to work on the craft of writing for yourself, or, you know, to write novels or indie films, stuff like that.

Great writing attracts great actors. It attracts money. Without a great script, you have nothing.

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

How I work is that I write a story I'd like to read. Then you fly to Paris or Sydney and the interviewers talk about the greater significance of your work.

Writing novels takes up about 100% of my available working time.

I'm much more a writer than an actor. Although I have a great respect for that and I enjoy acting still, it really is about the world that I'm creating. That's where my future is.

Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was struck by this - the appetite of the blank page for ever more information, ever more data. An empty book is a greedy thing. You are right: You wind up using everything you know, and often more than once.

If you don't like my book, write your own.

I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don’t. We never know. We just make stuff up.

Being a writer of fiction isn't like being a compulsive liar, honestly.

I finish the book so I can see how it's going to end. I write that first sentence, and if it's the right first sentence, it leads to the right second sentence and three years later you have a 500-page manuscript, but it really is like going on a trip, going on a journey. It's a voyage.

The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel.

You may be able to write a novel, you may not. You will never know until you have worked very hard indeed and written at least part of it. You will never really know until you have written the whole of it and submitted it for publication.

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don’t you? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.

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.

Certainly, for me, and it's gone this way on every project I've worked on, the "writing" never ends until you're done with the movie.

Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.