Cyrano de Bergerac Quotes

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

I have some great stories and I will get around to writing a book.

As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.

I think I'm a born storyteller. Inspiration is all around me. I can read a newspaper article and come up with an idea for a book.

I have been writing since I was a kid and thought what I wrote down could one day be made into a book.

Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms.

If you don't see the book you want on the shelves, write it.

I've never actually even contemplated writing a book or having a book.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

You become a great writer by writing.

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author.

Prose is all about embellishing and describing.

I have always loved reading, so was interested in the literary world, and took many literary portraits.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

My secrets must be poetic to be believable.

Truth may be stranger than fiction on a plot and narrative basis, but fiction can investigate tone in a way that things based on a true story can't.

When I was about eight, I realised the person whose name was on the book got money for it, and it seemed almost too good to be true that you could get paid for making things up.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

As an editor, I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel, 'The Lifeboat,' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night, and I really wanted my company to publish it, but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling.

I'm a magpie in my fiction, taking whatever looks shiny and curious to line the nest of my story.

I'm a very conceptual writer.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.