Orson Scott Card Quotes

I think people who write for kids, we have that ability to go back into our own lives.

I'm always saying that my books are not autobiographical because they're not. I can't choose any one scene and say, 'Oh, this is exactly what happened to me!' I just use little snippets of things as a starting point!

I just simply write as it moves me. I may be writing about a book or a movie or a person, places where I've been or something I've done. Or politics. It's going to what's on my mind at the moment.

Most fiction comes from your experience.

Every writer is going to end up drawing from their own experiences in one way or another.

The stories that I tell, the topics that I choose to write about, usually are suggested by something that I've done before.

Of course you bank on your experience, but as a sounding board. It isn't that you write down what happens to you every day. You wouldn't be a writer if you did that.

Novels allow me to create a whole world.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

I never like to put myself in the stories; in 'Lost in the City,' there are fourteen stories, and there's only one, 'The First Day,' about a little girl going to school, that has anything to do with me.

I'll take a certain concern of my own or a situation and try to frame it around a fictional story, but sometimes just straight-up autobiographical songs work well, and sometimes a story is better. I like stories. I like to hear them. I don't think there are enough of them in songs anymore.

While novels are fiction, mine are usually very close to my heart. Like my other books, 'The Lemon Orchard' is inspired by something I care about. I care so deeply. The stories are my dreams, and I want to do a lot of research. Roberto is based on a real live friend of mine named Armando who worked in my garden.

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'

In order for me to write a scene, it's very important for me to see and experience everything with my own eyes, so yes, I was able to visit some remarkable houses and destinations while I was in China.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

You can draw inspiration from anything. If you're a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl, or somebody you're casually talking to says something that makes you so mad - you can create an entire scenario around that.

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

I loved all ghost stories. So I guess it was only a matter of time before I wrote one.

I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards.

As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

Even the worst book can give us something to think about.

Writers do draw inspiration from their own lives, which, quite frankly, might be more interesting than fiction.