Nicholas Sparks Quotes

An author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place.

The first sentence of a book is a promise.

I think a setting is hugely important. I look at setting as a character with its own look, sound, history, quirks, goofy temperaments and moods.

I am very interested in place, and the influences of place on characters.

Place colors everything; It is the thing by which I find my way in my fiction.

If you ask me, the place that a story happens is as equal character. It's almost like an ecological viewpoint: These people are living in this piece of land, and in this piece of land in this time this is possible. For me, I almost think location first. It's time first - what year is it - then where are we, and then who is in it.

If you get the landscape right, the characters will step out of it, and they'll be in the right place.

A sense of place is very important in writing.

Till now I have never shot a scene without taking account of what stands behind the actors because the relationship between people and their surroundings is of prime importance.

Strangely enough, the first character in Fried Green Tomatoes was the cafe, and the town. I think a place can be as much a character in a novel as the people.

Location is a very important aspect to songwriting.

Choosing location is integral to the film: in essence, another character.

My dream was, and always had been, to write a book. To be a writer.

I always try to make the setting fit the story I have in mind.

I would say 'Flower' had a story. It is told through the environment.

To me, the contemporary novel suffers from a lack of sense of place - or spirit of place, if you will. It's not important to most writers, I must assume, or they try to research a given background on sabbatical. Not for me. I write about places I've lived long before I ever set pen to paper.

Something that has been every important to me in all my projects has been location, the place where they are installed.

Writing a book is an adventure.

I have a very acute sense of place and time, so all of my stories are rooted in a place and a time.

I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have made safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you do not have to write it up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for you. But, I don't know - the poetry written in that city might not seem like poetry if read outside of the city. It would be like the jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to appreciate them.

When I'm writing a book, generally I start with the mood and setting, along with a couple of specific images—things that have come into my head, totally abstracted from any narrative, that I've fixated on. After that, I construct a world, or an area, into which that general setting, that atmosphere, and the specific images I've focused on can fit.

Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.

A book of great beauty and manically exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor . . . The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.

The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.

If you don't see the book you want on the shelves, write it.