Patrick Rothfuss Quotes

The first sentence of a book is a promise.

You always try to do your own thing. One of the things I wanted to do was to write a book that combines some of the best traits of contemporary fantasy with some of the traits of the historical novel.

My job as an author is to tell the story in the best way possible, to make it flow seamlessly and get the reader to keep turning the page.

A good scenario doesn't make a good science fiction story - but it's a setting within which a good science fiction story might be told.

Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.

Place colors everything; It is the thing by which I find my way in my fiction.

With all of the qualities of the scene-setting, the dialogue, the place and time and the time and place in which your characters move. And I want to move with the characters, move with them and describe the world in which they are living.

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

Basically, all novelists should want to tell a story, and if they don't want to, they shouldn't be novelists. I think story-telling is important and underrated.

Usually when I'm trying to establish character, I try and find out where they live.

The fantasy that appeals most to people is the kind that's rooted thoroughly in somebody looking around a corner and thinking, 'What if I wandered into this writer's people here?' If you've done your job and made your people and your settings well enough, that adds an extra dimension that you can't buy.

When an author creates a town in her novels, she spends a great deal of time visualizing the streets and buildings, landmarks and topography. And while the town becomes real in her imagination, it's rare for an author to see the place she's created actually spring to life.

When I write, I imagine places more than people.

I've just always been very interested in story above all.

I'm not a teacher; I'm not a historian. I'm trying to create a world for my characters.

To write a story is to create a world of your own.

The first job of a storyteller is to make the reader feel the story, to get the reader to live in the skin of the character.

In fantasy and science fiction, world-building is an essential part of the story. But as a reader, I don't just want descriptions of food, clothing, and places. I want to understand the world to its core, through the eyes of those who live in it.

Notice how every science fiction movie or television show starts with a shot of the location where the story is about to occur. Movies that take place in outer space always start with a shot of stars and a starship. Movies that take place on another world always start with a shot of that planet. This is to let you know where you are. Novels and stories start the same way. You have to give the reader a sense of where he is and what's happening as quickly as possible. You don't want to start the story by confusing the reader.

When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

What interests me very much as a writer is the ability for writing to have our lives to be occupied so vividly by others. I think that's what we long for as writers.

There is a rule for fantasy writers: The more truth you mix in with a lie, the stronger it gets.

If you get the landscape right, the characters will step out of it, and they'll be in the right place.

If it's commercial fiction that you want to write, it's story, story, story. You've got to get a story where if you tell it to somebody in a paragraph, they'll go, "Tell me more." And then when you start to write it, they continue to want to read more. And if you don't, it won't work.

The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.