Cornelia Funke Quotes

We speak of stories ending, when in truth it is we who end. The stories go on and on.

You have to be very careful when you're working on a sequel, because it has to be a continuation of what you did before.

For me, the favourite chapters have always been the last chapters in the books. I knew exactly how each book would end - and how the first chapter of the following book would begin. I knew I wanted to leave the readers with answers - and a bunch of new questions!

Once I came to really understand the mechanics of three-act structure, my life got a great deal easier. It doesn't tell you how to write your book, but it helps you understand why things aren't working, or what kind of beat needs to come next.

You can watch an episode of Friends or an episode of Law & Order and just drop in, but you're not going to in the middle of Season 4, Episode 5 of Lost. It's like picking up a Harry Potter book and flipping to a chapter. You have to read it from beginning to end.

Everything has its cycle. I think it's appropriate for us to be ending now. But the beauty of storytelling, and the beauty of film and television is that it continues on.

You're never alone when you're reading a book.

A book is a dream that you hold in your hands.

Stories took twists and turns down fairy-tale paths or down very human everyday ones. You think you’re at the end of the book, and it’s only the end of a chapter.

It is the 'follow through' that makes the great difference between ultimate success and failure, because it is so easy to stop.

And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.

I think writers can get too attached to these worlds they create, these characters they make real, so that, instead of ending the story where the story's asking to end, they draw it out, unable to let go.

...With stories even a page can take me hours, but the truth seems to flow out as fast as I can get it down.

Yeah, we've become really good friends. Our characters start dating in the book, and um, yeah, I think we - and we made up little back stories to our characters and little outtakes that we'd bring up to Edgar as a joke, and you know, kind of see different sides of stuff. So yeah, we have a really good time.

I am thrilled when I read about fans using my stories as springboards to read about either the historical characters or the myths and legends in the books.

My favorite new character isn't new, but more fleshed out - Gadd, the alekeep at the Tunnel. He's got him some teeth and tats. His history is hinted at in Discourse, and I plan to explore it more in later books.

... I have read in your face, as plain as if it was a book, that but for some trouble and sorrow we should never know half the good there is about us.

A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck.

You mean, like a book?

I'm not thinking in any big thematic or conceptual terms - especially in this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] when I was trying to make the voices more active, more energetic.

As much fun as it is to read a book, writing a book is one level deeper than that.

The end of all stories, even if the writer forebears to mention it, is death, which is where time stops short. Sheherezade knew this, which is why she kept on spinning another story out of the bowels of the last one, never coming to a point where she could say: "This is the end." Because it would have been.

I don't think anything needs to happen in a book.

Writing is acting in the sense that you're imagining and inhabiting another. In the book I was trying to get at the root of what true acting is.

I do think there are always ways to create what seem like insurmountable powers, but then suddenly you find their limitations and that's the nature of comic book storytelling - always has been.