Anne McCaffrey Quotes

People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints.

To tell a good story and to illuminate the world: the two things are completely linked. That is the point. That is what I've always wanted to do.

I enjoy receiving and giving realistic fiction, for both children and adults, with strong characters, beautiful language, and humane visions.

I have always loved story - I escaped within it as a child, I read every day, I love figuring out the complex layers of an author's work.

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.

Fiction is a report from the interior.

Whether it's fiction or nonfiction, writing takes me to another world.

I write fiction. I make things up, it's what I do.

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building.

To me, there is nothing higher than fiction. Nothing. It is fundamentally who I am. I am a teller of stories. For me, that's the only way I can make sense of the world, with all the dance that it involves.

The greatest thing that you have when you're a showrunner is this opportunity to create worlds.

In some ways, the more that I write songs, the more I feel that telling a story is the most important thing; just being able to close your eyes when you hear some lyrics and go somewhere.

I had originally been looking at writing, including fiction.

Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms.

I think that you don't really want to write a book that doesn't really move people and doesn't get them to think.

I do take this insane pleasure in world-building. I get the world in my head, but I have to make sure everyone else gets it.

I view myself as a fiction writer who just happens to write nonfiction. I think I look at the world through a fiction-writer's eyes.

Writing a novel is an incredibly free experience. One puts one's self in a narrative mode. You can go off in any direction - the past, the future, or go laterally, or include one's own beliefs. It's total freedom.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

I write books that will make 10 or 12 hours disappear, and hopefully they'll resonate with you for a few days, where you'll remember the characters and the story. That suits me fine; I am happy with that.

I think that my passion for writing fantasy began at about the same time as my passion for reading fantasy.

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

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.

I have no particular reader in mind, but a passionate desire to tell an honest, moving story.