W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses.

A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.

I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is to think that what you need to write a novel is imagination, creativity and a facility with words. Yes, you need all those things, but a novel is a highly complex organism that needs to be dealt with in quite a logical manner.

I had never written anything. And I had never studied writing. So my motives were pure: I had a great story... a courtroom drama that I sort of fictionalized, and that became 'A Time to Kill.'

There are many oral historians in America, but my books are made using the rules of novel writing. I have a beginning, a plot, characters.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

I would never make up a character who didn't exist or an event that didn't transpire. If you're a real writer, you have other tools in your toolbox to build drama.

While writing a novel, I don't read anything new in fiction. I am too engrossed.

As a writer, my only responsibility is to tell a compelling story.

When writing, I'm not thinking about war, even if I'm writing about it. I'm thinking about sentences, rhythm and story. So the focus, when I'm working, even if it's on a story that takes place at war, is not on bombs or bullets. It's on the story.

Good scripts and interesting stories are hard enough to find.

I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

It's not easy to tell a story about writers and make that feel like a complete story and an interesting story.

In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

I don't like to use writing assignments, exercises. I think too often people get comfortable writing in that vein, but you can't go on to write a novel comprised of short writing exercises.

As always, we start off with asking, 'What's a good episode?' We don't think about timing, and we don't think about logistics. We just think about what would be good.

Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.

My job is to help my father tell stories.

I always had an interest in telling stories.

My story is very long. And for somebody to write a good story, one needs a good writer, too.

I'm good at description and imparting flow to a story, but I don't necessarily understand the value of long scenes.