William Gibson Quotes

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don’t you? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.

Sometimes I read a script and it's obvious from early on that it's one where the suspension of disbelief has to develop strongly from page one. Some are more reality-based.

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

I can create countries just as I can create the actions of my characters. That is why a lot of travel seems to me a waste of time.

I make things up for a living. It would be pretty boring to just fictionalize real people.

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

I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.

I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories.

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

In real life, writers tend to be quite boring, but in our books, we're having exciting adventures all the time.

Fantasy is fantasy. It's fiction. It's not meant to be a textbook. I don't believe in letting research overwhelm the fiction. That's a danger of science fiction in particular, as opposed to fantasy. A lot of writers forget that what they're doing is supposed to be art.

They say truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, but there's such a thing as believability when you're writing a novel.

What is the difference between the novelist and the liar? At some moments, I have often wondered.

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

Authors make stuff up. Let's not pretend it's any more magical than that.

As writers, our job is to try to create, in a fake space, something that feels true. That's just straight-up fiction: Invent a character that doesn't exist; make them seem like they do.

I write as if I've lived a lot of things I haven't lived.

I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

The great thing about writing is, if you don't like the world, we'll create a different one.

There are two magic acts I want to pull off when I write. One is creating a feeling that when you're inside a book, you believe everything you're reading even when you know it's not true. And the second is an extension of that, which is you know it's not true, you know it's not real, but you believe it anyway. And it's that believing of the story that isn't real that attracted me to writing and storytelling in general.

I used to go outside every day and invent these elaborate worlds and scenarios in my head, and when I grew too old for playing pretend, I started to write everything down instead.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.

Good fiction creates its own reality.