Ninja Quotes

In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.

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 certainly knew from an early age... how to tell stories; how to create pictures in other people's heads.

The key thing if you're a writer is to visualize the scene and convey it to the penciller and turn the penciller loose.

A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.

Getting the chance at 40 to make up stories that other people would draw and other people would then read is pretty weird.

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

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

I'd probably play games obsessively if I didn't write, although I admit I don't read novels partly because I don't enjoy it, not just because it's the wrong side of the creator-consumer barrier for me. I'm a visual writer. I think in moving 3D images and write down what I observe.

There really isn't a story that you can't tell inside of it. It's very much a clearinghouse for anything that goes on in the world. So you're not at all limited.

I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.

I try and make little stories. Whether it's with a pencil or with bits of records, it's really the same thing.

I've always written. At the age of six or seven, I would get sheets of A4 paper and fold them in half, cut the edges to make a little eight-page booklet, break it up into squares and put in little stick men with little speech bubbles, and I'd have a spy story, a space story and a football story.

Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

Writing is writing to me. I'm incapable of saying no to any writing job, so I've done everything - historical fiction, myths, fairy tales, anything that anybody expresses any interest in me writing, I'll write. It's the same reason I used to read as a child: I like going somewhere else and being someone else.

Yeah, in my scripts, I don't tend to describe landscape too clearly because I like to keep it really basic and sort of let people paint their own picture. I don't find it helpful to spend a page describing a setting, except for maybe a few key things.

Once they're on paper, they're gone. I like to do as much with the words, as far as image goes.

I used to be a freelance journalist, so I had to write fast, but I always found writing nonfiction constraining. I like the freedom of fiction, where I get to invent everything, and tidy, conclusive endings are within my control.

As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully.

Fiction is too beautiful to be about just one thing. It should be about everything.

A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.

I like the challenge of creating a world with only sentences.

One of my goals is to allow readers to see my characters and the world they inhabit as vividly as possible.

As writers, we do our best to conjure a world so vivid that the reader can practically walk through it - but we're still only using words and relying on readers to do a lot of work of imagining. Providing pictures as well as words offers a whole new dimension to the experience of consuming a story.

I begin a book with imagery, more than I do with an idea or a character. Some kind of poetic image.