C. S. Lewis Quotes

On the whole, stories don't write themselves.

When I start to write, I see my stories as a kind of movie. For instance, I ask myself, "What kind of opening do I want for this book?"

Good ideas stay with you until you eventually write the story.

I do not put myself in a box and say, for instance, I'm writing post-colonial literature. I don't know what I'm writing. That's the business of professors and critics. My job is to tell a story, and that's it.

Eventually the writing takes time. What I want to do is get the story down and I want to know what happens as I write my way into the knowledge of the story.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.

I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.

When I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do not very much care, how it is to end.

That was one of the key things - when you asked the story about the writing of the story - one of the things we wanted to make sure was that it grew out of.

When I'm sure I have a story, I call my collaborators and we begin to discuss it. And we conduct studies of certain subjects to make sure of our terrain. Then, finally, in the last month or two, I write the story.

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

Even though I may not intend it when I set out to write the book, these places just emerge as major players in what I'm doing, almost as if they are insisting on it.

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.

I don't ever want to impose something on the story. I want the story to tell me.

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

I think everything we do, on one level or another, as writers, most of our writing is informed by our world view.

Every day, I learn something new. I think one of the most exciting things for a writer is to work on a TV show. It's like a novel. You have a really long time to develop and learn about the characters, and you can just really keep digging in deeper, every week.

I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.

Making sentences is what I do. I mean, the story will come as I write.

I start with characters, and then I start writing, and then, if I'm lucky, things start to happen.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

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.

Outlining is not writing. Coming up with ideas is not writing. Researching is not writing. Creating characters is not writing. Only writing is writing.

I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.