Charles de Lint Quotes

I think I started writing because no one had ever told me you can write about the things you know in a musical. They don't have to come from some far off place.

We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it.

If I don't cry while writing a key emotional scene, my gut feeling is it's failed.

With 'A Northern Light,' I've already heard from teenage readers, teachers, librarians - it's been so gratifying. It's amazing that you can take something that matters so deeply to you and make it matter to someone else.

The hardest thing to teach young writers is that it's wonderful to tell your truth. And that's what you should do. But it damn well better be beautiful.

I just try to write the best story I can, a story I would love to read, and hope that readers feel the same.

I always assumed people wanted to hear me tell stories, but then I had 'The Sunset Tree.' It turned out, my own stories were the ones that registered with people the hardest.

I write because writing is the gift God has given me to help people in the world.

Whether you want to entertain or to provoke, to break hearts or reassure them, what you bring to your writing must consist of your longings and disappointments.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

If a reader comes across a story that makes them cry, you can be sure that the writer felt every single thing that makes the reader cry.

When you're a writer, you talk about things that move you, that you feel really deep inside you that's something that moves you, and you hope it'll move people, too.

I think that successful writers somehow capture truths that resonate with readers.

What lasts in the reader's mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy. If the phrase is not affecting the reader, what's it doing there? Make it do its job or cut it without mercy or remorse.

Writing is such a strangely and radically private act, and yet its purpose is this great sense of connection and community. I mean, I wanted people to love the book. And the only way to get them to love it is to try to make it good for them. So of course the audience has to be considered.

Writing songs is no different than explaining to somebody what you dreamed last night: No one ever gives you crap for what you dreamed last night. "I was laying in my bed, and all of a sudden a stallion jumped on my bed and the next thing I know I was in Mars but it looked like my kitchen"... That's kind of what I do with my songs, write them in a dream-like manner. It's up to people to swallow it however they want.

This is where I begin to do the writing. I am now going to be the pen and not the paper.

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

You can't write something actively trying to please everyone - you're going to end up with watery soup that way. You just have to write stories you would want to read and hope that people like them.

Fiction writing feels more honest to me.

Whenever I write, I only write about what I know or what I have experienced or feeling.

The thing to remember when you're writing," he said, " is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader. I don't care what literary device you might use, or belief systems you tap into--if you can make a story true for the reader, if you can give them a glimpse into another way of seeing the world, or another way that they can cope with their problems, then that story is a succes.

Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!

A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader's soul.

I want a book to contain a world - indeed the world. Writing is my main means of engagement with the world and I want the scars of that engagement to be left in the language.