Patrick Ness Quotes

I hate even the idea of a synopsis. When stories are really working, when you're providing subtextual exploration and things that are deeply layered, you're obligated to not say things out loud.

I often attribute my screenwriting to journalism because they drill in the who, what, when, where and why - but we really need to land on that why. That's what I've been exploring in my writing for many years and trying to get better at.

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.

One of the things I love about writing is the way you can use what you know and what you've experienced, without actually writing about yourself. I've given many of my experiences and perceptions to many of the characters in the book, but none of them is me.

The novelist must ground his work in faithful study of human nature.

I want to be inside Nic Pizzolatto's brain.

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.

I'm looking forward to writing more novels for young adults.

Linda Svendsen's 'Marine Life' was important. I was nearly 22. Larry Mathews discussed the book in a creative writing class. We examined her stories, figured out how they worked.

I have no formal training as a writer at all, not even a single English class in college. However, my adult books are all science fiction, which has some similarities to YA.

I use a lot of narration; I have a very prosaic style. I like to get you invested in the character first and do a lot of work in the first pages of each issue to try to re-establish things and keep the symbolism of a story very tucked beneath the surface.

I wanted to write a novel where the meaning is in the story and characters and the subliminal, in the shades and nuances. It's exciting to develop that as a writer.

I'm very drawn to the human condition and the emotional aspects of stories. It's what's not on the page that I get excited about.

One reason we love fiction is because stories have a comforting shape. They provide a resolution that's lacking in our regular lives.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

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.

The way that Dickens structured his books has a form that we most readily recognize now from, say, the great T.V. series, like 'The Wire' or 'The Sopranos.' There's one central plot line, but then from that spin off all kinds of subplots.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

Personally, I've made myself a very small window of what I enjoy in this business, which is I love being a big part of the storytelling process.

I've read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, 'Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.' I don't want to be part of that.

I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

It isn't as if a writer merely records life as it unfurls. Reality does not automatically transcribe as literature; real people are not shapely, compelling characters to be harvested. Charming facts and sharp observations rarely slide seamlessly into whatever narrative is at hand.

There's so much more to a book than just the reading.

One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.

I am trying to write novels for properly clever people, but I also want them to be proper novels that also stick in a person's mind and have an atmosphere about them.