Steven Erikson Quotes

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

I love sitting at my desk and facing a quiet day with a pen in my hand, and putting myself into a story. It's kind of weird, isn't it? I mean, to absent myself from real life and make up stories is strange, but I started doing this when I was ten years old. It was all I wanted to do.

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.

I don't really have those kinds of intentions when I write a scene. I try to follow the internal logic of the fiction, rather than make an argument or an assertion.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

Whenever I'm writing a book, small details from my life always creep in.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

I make a rod for my own back because people see my novels as quasi documentaries. But it is never history that's the main event of my books. It's my characters.

I'm a novelist. I'm not a crusader, and I'm not an editorial writer. And I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.

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

The laws of literary creation are unique; they don't change, and they are the same for everyone everywhere. I mean that you can tell a story that covers three hours of human life or three centuries - it comes to the same thing. Each writer who creates something authentic in a natural way instinctively also creates the technique that suits him.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

I should tell you that many people think that authors just cut and paste from real life into books. It doesn't work quite that way.

Novels will remain my meat and potatoes, what sustain me imaginatively.

People are always thinking that I'm the main character in my books, but each one has been different, and sometimes they've been men.

The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life.

I have been writing songs and poems since I was a little girl. I started writing short scripts, which evolved into the idea for a book.

I wanted to tell a story that interested me as much in the telling as in the watching.