Wilbur Smith Quotes

I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.

When I do 'Sweet Tooth,' really, whatever I want to do with the characters kind of goes. I'm sort of in charge.

The power of daring anything their fancy suggest, as always been conceded to the painter and the poet.

As a novelist, you have to be free. Books can't be an act of filial duty.

I do like the idea of being an auteur in the sense of writing and being in your own stuff.

Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.

The one thing that makes writing a better pastime than reading is that you can make things turn out the way you want in the end!

That freedom of writing you don't get in other formats, I'd rather leave it to someone else to deal with the headache of drafting my book into a screenplay.

I decided to become an author when my grandmother taught me to write, when I was six. I can still recall the sensation of being able to turn words into stories. It was a miracle.

Fall into your sentences; enjoy writing them. Love the world you are creating.

I'm a writer of fiction. I try to write about my time, but it's dangerous if I'm seen as an investigative writer. I manipulate and change and control.

If I had my druthers, I wouldn't have anyone's words in my script but my own, but if you want complete autonomy, just stick to novels.

Well,the fun part of being a writer is that it's like making a wonderful film, with no limit on my budget. I can design the sets, the costume, the lightings, I write the script, and then I get to perform all the roles as I step into each character's skin, zip up, and adopt that point of view. So, to me, they are all compelling and fascinating.

Then what shall I write? I can't just write that this happened then this happened then this happened to boring infinitum. I'll let my journal grow just like the mind does, just like a tree or beast does, just like life does. Why should a book tell a tale in a dull straight line? Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.

I never get sick of writing my own stories because there's a certain comfort in knowing you will never run out of material. It's relaxing, actually, to write.

Writing allows for fictitious voices - the voices of persons unlike myself - that might otherwise be muted.

Words, living and ghostly, the quick and the dead, crowd and jostle the otherwise too empty corridors of my mind ... To move among this bright, strange, often fabulous herd of beings, to summon them at my will, to fasten them on to paper like flies, that they may decorate it, this is the pleasure of writing.

Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.

Some of this book—perhaps too much—has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it—and perhaps the best of it—is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

I write to be the characters that I am not.

The thing that made me turn more towards writing was realizing how hard it was going to be to get a singular vision on film and how much more control I would have if I were writing novels.

Novelists get to direct the perfect films. We get to cast every part. We dress the set exactly as we wish.

And so I write the way I myself would like the book to be – if I were a child. I write for the child within me.

Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.

One thing I really want to explore is writing.