David Almond Quotes

There is poetry in fiction. If you cannot see it and feel it when you write, you need to step back and examine what you are doing wrong. If you have not figured out how to write a simple declarative sentence and make it sing with that poetry, you are not yet ready to write an entire book.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

The advice I continually give to young writers is this, "Learn to paint pictures with words." Not just once upon a time, but ... In the long secret dust of ages, beneath a blue forgotten sky, where trade winds caress the sun bleached shores of unknown realms ... See, as much as there are words in poetry, there is a poetry in words. Use it, stay faithful to the path you have set your heart upon and follow it.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).

All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words 'Write what you know' is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don't. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?

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?"

I don't think I'm essentially interested in children's books. I'm interested in writing, and in pictures. I'm interested in people and in children because they are people.

In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

I think of myself as a songwriter, a weaver of story and imagination in a way that a novelist might write a book.

I think when I write movies and plays and books and magazine articles, they're all storytelling, and reality is the common denominator that binds them.

As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.

Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea.

My job is writing for people to enjoy and then writing about a broader and a deeper world.

I'm working with fragments a lot of the time and the connective tissue isn't there yet. I think of it the way comics work. You have a block here and a block here, and there's this white space in between. Somehow your mind makes the leap to connect those two blocks. Finding a way to trick your mind into connecting those blocks is one of the fun things for me about writing. You can have those leaps that will emerge into something, if you're lucky.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.

I'm constantly creating and writing.

The way I write things, I just write them with a clash between reality and fantasy mostly. You have to use fantasy to show different sides of reality; it's how it can bend.

The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.

I haven't found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as a sitting at a desk writing, trying to imagine a story no matter how bizarre it is, [or] going out and getting into the weirdness of reality and doing a little time on the Proud Highway.

It might be more difficult because you haven't got a book or a prop, but for the most part I like to write unpaid... initially and my own stories.

The difference between writing a story and simply relating past events is that a story, in order to be acceptable, must have shape and meaning. It is the old idea that art is the bringing of order out of chaos.

One of the difficulties of being a writer must be that you create drama that you can't live out. That's one of the wonderful things about acting.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.