P. G. Wodehouse Quotes

If it's commercial fiction that you want to write, it's story, story, story. You've got to get a story where if you tell it to somebody in a paragraph, they'll go, "Tell me more." And then when you start to write it, they continue to want to read more. And if you don't, it won't work.

I learned everything I know about plot from Dame Agatha (Christie).

All the old school Young Adult novels inspired me. I grew up reading R.L. Stine, Christopher Pike, Richie Cusick, and so on. I loved how you never really knew who the 'bad guys' were in their works, and I wanted to capture that feeling with 'Don't Look Back.'

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

Storytelling is storytelling. Good stories need compelling characters and interesting conflicts. That's the bottom line no matter what medium you're writing for.

I say that glorious prose is a fine and laudable thing, but without an enthralling story, it's just so much verbal tapioca. Simply put, the best books have both, and the best writers disparage neither.

I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories.

I write largely plot-driven stories.

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.

With fiction, it could be about anything. It just has to be good writing, like Maria Semple's "Where'd You Go, Bernadette," which I read recently. I want to forget I have a book in my hand.

Cormoran Strike is an amazing creation and I can't wait for his next outing. Strike is so instantly compelling that it's hard to believe this is a debut novel. I hope there are plenty more Cormoran Strike adventures to come. A beautifully written debut novel introducing one of the most unique and compelling detectives I've come across in years.

I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next. I have no other criterion.

I make no distinction between writing and storytelling; I've always wanted to tell stories.

Usually with film writing I start with characters, and set about writing their story.

Scripts are kind of a bare bones type of reading material.

The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

Would you like to hear my story, Bella? It doesn't have a happy ending - but which of ours does? If we had happy endings, we'd all be under gravestones now.

I started writing stories when I was 9 or 10. I wrote my first screenplay-type document when I was 14.

A witty illustration or an apt story will accomplish more than columns of argument.

There's not a lot of direct back story but you do get to see them playing around each other a lot.

Kids, if anything, are harder to write for because they are a more discerning audience. They will not stay with you if you go off on a tangent or if you give them extraneous information that doesn't serve the story. You really have to tell a tight story. You have to give them humor and suspense and believable characters. All those things that adults want too, but you have to be really on your game when you're writing for kids.

Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.

When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.

You can't tell a good story without conflict - the story can't be beautiful or meaningful. We're taught to run from conflict, and it's robbing us of some really good stories.