Eugene Delacroix Quotes

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

So far, everything I've worked on has been deeply connected to reality. I'm not constitutionally opposed to working on something completely fictional, either. It just happens that a lot of these stories have crossed my path in a way that makes them intriguing, but I'm up for anything that's intellectually engaging.

Before I started writing, I'd never read much fiction. I was more interested in non-fiction. I'm taking the same approach to theatre: I can operate from a position of ignorance and make up my own rules instead of being bound by customs and practice.

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?

The difficulty in the way of writing a children's play is that Barrie was born too soon. Many people must have felt the same about Shakespeare. We who came later have no chance. What fun to have been Adam, and to have had the whole world of plots and jokes and stories at one's disposal.

People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.

Never believe that the fiction writing life makes sense.... It's insanity by definition.

Well, good science fiction is intelligent. It asks big questions that are on people's minds. It's not impossible. It has some sort of root in the abstract. So automatically you're getting closer to potentially divine sources of interest because it is abstract. It's one of the only ways that a film actor can express himself in the abstract and have audiences still go along for the ride. They don't contend it. They accept it, that they're going to go places that are a bit more of the imagination, a bit more out there, and that's more and more where I like to dance.

I’m an artist who is always looking for what is possible. I’m always looking to extend the boundaries.

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

Every movie I do is challenging for me. There is some element of imaginative that you wouldn't have in a typical movie.

A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it's self-consciousness.

Imagination, which is the Eldorado of the poet and of the novel-writer, often proves the most pernicious gift to the individuals who compose the talkers instead of the writers in society.

If the imagination is shackled, and nothing is described but what we see, seldom will anything truly great be produced either in Painting or Poetry

Novelists are people who have discovered that they can dampen their neuroses by writing make-believe. We will keep on doing that no matter what, while offering loftier explanations.

Everyone who works in the domain of fiction is a bit crazy. The problem is to render this craziness interesting.

Creativity needs discipline and freedom.

The triumph of writing fiction is that by doing so, writers can build a more ideal world in themselves.

I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.

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

I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.

I really dislike it when people talk about "experimental," because any good writer is experimental.

I don't think writing fiction has changed my worldview.