Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

I love to invent - avoiding the truth. I need to dramatize.

Francie was ten years old when she first found an outlet in writing. What she wrote was of little consequence. What was important was that the attempt to write stories kept her straight on the dividing line between truth and fiction. If she had not found this outlet in writing, she might have grown up to be a tremendous liar.

Being a writer of fiction isn't like being a compulsive liar, honestly.

If we assiduously cultivate our powers of exaggeration, perhaps we, too, shall obtain the Paradise of Liars. And there Raphael shall paint for us scores and scores of his manifestly impossible pictures... and Shakespeare will lie to us of fabulous islands far past 'the still-vex'd Bermoothes,' and bring us fresh tales from the coast of Bohemia. For no one will speak the truth there, and we shall all be perfectly happy.

To write, you need to find what you love.

I get to do what I love every day. I get to crawl into someone else's head and I love that.

I adore falseness. I don't want you to tell me accurately what happened yesterday. I want you to lie about it, to exaggerate, to entertain me.

I was a book lover from the beginning. I loved, love, words and images and ideas, the ways a book can make you feel things deeply or help you understand something you never even knew there were words for.

Sure, best seller. I'd love to knock Stephen King off the top of the list. I know I won't, but, after all, I spend my life inventing a different reality.

I am happy to keep working on books because I'm always reading, and I'm always trying to fall in love.

Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.

If I just sit here, what am I going to do? I don't have a trade. I don't teach or anything. I just love to make up characters and gradually build a story around them.

Reading has always been the great love of my life.

I've loved reading all my life.

What is the difference between the novelist and the liar? At some moments, I have often wondered.

We all know that I love writing Gambit.

I love 'Year One.' I read 'Year One' over and over again.

When I was really young, my ambition wasn't to do science. I didn't really know that I could. It was to write a great novel.

I have always, always loved words.

A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts.

I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.

If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer ... We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth.

Lie. Put down on paper the most interesting lies you can imagine. . .and then make them plausible.

What is a writer of fiction but a liar with a licence?

Yes, one uses what one knows, but autobiography means something else. I should never be able to write a real autobiography; I always end by falsifying and fictionalizing—I’m a liar, in fact. That means I’m a novelist, after all. I write about what I know.