Nas Quotes

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

I see myself as a novelist, period. I mean, the material I work with is what is classified as science fiction and fantasy, and I really don't think about these things when I'm writing. I'm just thinking about telling a story and developing my characters.

The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know.

Writing stories, adopting other characters, making up fantastic stories and tales, this is a way of perhaps enhancing who I am. Writing stories takes a commonplace old life and makes it all somehow more interesting. And hopefully I can do that in a way that touches a lot of people in their lives, too.

No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.

I can make up stories with the best of them. I've been telling stories since I was a little kid.

I like to tell stories in my writing but I definitely use my own life experiences to tell that story.

As soon as I could write, I was writing stories.

Telling a story is an emotional and personal experience for me and I can't do without it.

The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.

Ironically, writing a novel is not a way to sort out your confusion.

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.

That's really the essence of what any fiction writer does. Some of it is research-based, but most of it is a really long-term, imaginative, empathetic effort to see the world the way someone whose experiences remote from yours might see it. Not every writer works that way; some writers make a wonderful career out of writing books that adhere very closely to how they view the world. The further I go with this, the more interested I get in trying to imagine my way into other perspectives that at first seem foreign to me.

I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.

I think there are some stories that need to be told by a specific person as opposed to in the third person.

A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

Writing is my number one passion. I've written two novels. I've written a screenplay. I also write short stories and poetry.

One writes such a story [The Lord of the Rings] not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mold of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much personal selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one's personal compost-heap; and my mold is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.

The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel.

The challenge is to write about real things magically.

Some writing courses will advise you to write what you know. I've always thought this is very odd advice ... because it means, for example, that I should not be writing about Nicholas Flamel, because I didn't live in France in the 15th Century, I was not an alchemyst, am not immortal (despite the rumours) and do not know magic.

I would spend my time telling stories or writing them.

I love writing fiction - you can take just what you want from a place, and leave the rest.

To me, writing is fun. It doesn't matter what you're writing, as long as you can tell a story.