Brian Selznick Quotes

Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.

For me, I get a part of an idea here and a little bit of an idea there, and then finally it accumulates into a movie.

Where story comes from, I don't know. I know that I become obsessed with something. An idea, an image, a person, the way a person talks. And then something starts happening that I can't explain, and it has a lot to do with language.

I've never dreamed of a story idea. I have such boring dreams.

My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.

I'm pretty restless in bed, so I can lie there for a couple of hours and be like, 'Hey, that happened today. What if that happened at a zoo?' I'll jot the idea down. Then I'm like, 'All right, so now that it's a zoo, that penguin's loose,' or, whatever. I usually start with broad ideas.

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.

I take in a lot of stuff from real life, movies, television, news and it all gets mixed in my head and somehow turns into a story idea.

If one day a TV series comes into my head, and that is what I want to write, I'll write it. It just depends what story is in my brain at the time.

If I don't have a project going, I sit down and begin to write something - a character sketch, a monologue, a description of some sight, or even just a list of ideas.

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.

I've always got maybe around four different titles in mind, maybe about four different ideas that I'd love to make.

Whenever I write a novel, most of the time it starts with barest slip of an idea.

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.'

I have these huge black foam boards on the wall, and tacked to them, I have these white punch cards with my story ideas, scenes and notes.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around.

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.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

At first, I see pictures of a story in my mind. Then creating the story comes from asking questions of myself. I guess you might call it the 'what if - what then' approach to writing and illustration.

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

There are many ways to go about a story. And if you give yourself some formal constraints, it just makes the job so much - maybe 'easier' isn't the right word, but because you know your boundaries, you can just play within those boundaries much more, so it's much more fun to do.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

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.