Deborah Harkness Quotes

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

When I read good stories, I want to write good stories too.

I'm a believer in using whatever works for fiction, but mostly, that's not life.

I love working fictional characters into a piece of history. It plays to my strengths, which are characterization and dialogue, and assists me in my admitted weakness, plot.

I think the reason I'm a writer is because first, I was a reader. I loved to read. I read a lot of adventure stories and mystery books, and I have wonderful memories of my mom reading picture books aloud to me. I learned that words are powerful.

I've always enjoyed making up stories, especially when I was bored and just sitting around. It got really serious after the children came along.

Authors make stuff up. Let's not pretend it's any more magical than that.

I think, if you want to grow a novelist, for that person to have a lot of boring time trying to entertain themselves is very important.

As a writer, it is always fun to imagine yourself in someone else's shoes.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

I sort of love reading the scripts and going, 'Oh wow, what a great idea. I never would have thought of that.'

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

It wasn't until I was in my teens that I started admiring writers as inspirations for my own work, and my earliest influences there were Stephen King, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Richard Adams.

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

Everyone has early fiction fantasies, but it wasn't until my second child Betsy was born that I allowed the urge to write a novel bubble up.

Storytelling is what lights my fire.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

People think writing a children's book is something you could do in an afternoon but it's actually really hard.

The characters emerge from my rather twisted mind. That's another enjoyable part of the job making stuff up.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

I learnt to love reading. And then I started scribbling stories, and I liked that even more.