Sandra Brown Quotes

I like it when I can hear directly from the writer: what they're seeing, what they're envisioning, and what their intention is.

A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.

When I'm writing, I'm creating the story and its character with words. I'm thinking about what the pictures will be like, but I never begin to sketch. The pictures are all in my head.

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

What I like about writing a stand alone novel is you're starting with a fresh world and fresh characters. Part of what I love about writing is that journey of discovery where it's all new to me as well.

As a writer, I absorb stories, allow them to churn within my own head and heart - often for years - until I find a way of telling them that fits both my time and temperament.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints.

For a writer it's a dream to sit and watch people as close as possible.

I know it may sound silly, but I think my short stories have a life and identity of their own. They crop up in all sorts of places.

When I write, it's like watching a movie in my head.

When I am writing a story it feels as real as the life I am experiencing off the page. It's an emotional illusion, I guess.

My books come to me in images, and sometimes the image is at the beginning of the book, and sometimes it's simply a flash somewhere in the middle.

I love writing dialogue, and I think a lot of my writing is visual and very cinematic.

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

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

I had to write about realistic circumstances. That's the way my brain works. And I think that gave me a sort of place in the field.

I work out the other bits, too, but I need to know what I look like, very early on. And then it's like a template; I'll fill that person out. If I get that out of the way, then I'm all right.

When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.

For me, the whole process involves envisioning this book in my head as I'm working.

I'm not a teacher; I'm not a historian. I'm trying to create a world for my characters.

When I write a book, characters come to life for me somewhere at the back of my head. I strive to make them flesh and blood in an abstract way, in words.