Garth Nix Quotes

A lot of time, with stories, I'll start out with a title and try to dream myself into the story that it evokes - a kind of subconscious exercise in which I'm trawling for some kind of entryway into fiction.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

I started improvising the Cliff character, based on someone I grew up with.

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?

I'm a writer, and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself.

I don't ever want to impose something on the story. I want the story to tell me.

I love storytelling so for me to get behind a story and get in there early in its infancy and kind of develop it in the early stages was something I really wanted to be a part of.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

You start as an audience member and create a world you're interested in, and then you move into the telling of those stories, bringing what has interested you as an audience member.

When you're a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work.

To write a story, I think you really have to open yourself up to the world.

To me, my characters are more real than most people I meet.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

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.

It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.

I believe that it's an author's job to cast his imagination into the far spaces. Your life should - and I think it's inescapable that it will - inform your work. I'm all for using anything that can make your art better, but your intuition should be an equal partner.

I don't know if it's good or bad, but when I first started writing I imitated the narrative thrust of a movie. And as I worked, I learned what you can do in fiction that you can't do in movies, and vice-versa.

I'm not one of those authors who claims to hear voices in my head or 'let the characters speak through me,' whatever that might mean.

I need a distance to my characters when I write.

Creating is one thing; telling the story is one thing. I see myself more as a storyteller than a story creator.

Many of my characters first came through to me as voices. That's why I use a tape recorder.

Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.

The way I sometimes approach my work, when I look at a script for the first time, is to identify what the archetypes are and what the writing is trying to do in that context.

What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.