Ryan Murphy Quotes

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

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.

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.

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.'

That's what writing is all about, after all, making others see what you have put down on the page and believing that it does, or could, exist and you want to go there.

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

Novels give you the opportunity to create a whole world. Because you create people, you make them talk... You decide who they are, whether they live or die. It's the closest thing to feeling like a god that you can come to.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

I love telling stories. Creating a character, a world, a whole universe out of nothing. That part I can't get enough of.

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

I like going back and writing fiction.

I have the power to write these books where I invent characters that I really like, and it gets to come out the way they want it to come out, and I get to make it happen.

In any genre you're working in, you can always find a way to tell a particular kind of story. I love fantasy; I love science fiction. I love all kinds of fiction, in fact.

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

What writer wants to make compromises with story? Story is the only reason you're in it.

Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

Working within the limitations of the shared world generally made the writing easier, because I didn't have to invent any of the characters or background, which is usually the hardest part.

A script can just be a blueprint, and you've got to go in and build it and color it in and paint it.

I guess I have a fascination with the idea of puppeteering. I think, in a lot of ways, directing is puppeteering. I guess I see a lot of analogies between what puppeteers and filmmakers do.

The things that I'm interested in directing are fiction, because then you're not married to a particular reality.

I write my books never thinking of an actor.

As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.

Cinema is a creative medium. The director has the right to express.