Natalia Ginzburg Quotes

I hadn't really thought about this until 'The Lake of Dreams,' but I've set all my stories in places that are familiar to me. It frees me up to spend more imaginative time on the characters.

When I'm the one who sits down and looks at the blank page and writes it out all the way, then I'll call it my script.

When I'm writing my blog, I think of myself at 13 years old, back in St. Louis, daydreaming about Hollywood.

I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.

I've always set my stories in places I know well. It frees me up to spend more imaginative time on the characters if I'm not worrying about the logistics.

I discovered writing children's books was a way to keep living in my imagination like a child. So I wrote a number of books before I started 'Magic Tree House.' Then, once I got that, I never looked back because I could be somewhere different in every single book.

I imagine a child. That child is me. I can reconstruct and vividly remember portions of my own childhood. I can see, taste, smell, feel, and hear them. Then what I do is, not write about that kid or about his world, but start to think of a book that would have pleased him.

As a kid I used to always write these stories... some of them were really cute; some of them were kind of crazy.

This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today-explode-f ly-apart-disint egrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, by reading your story, will catch fire, too?

I'm still in love with what I do, with the idea of making things up, so hours when I write always feel like very blessed hours to me.

I prefer writing originals.

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

When I decide to write a story, I don't think too much about what I want it to be, I just let things come naturally and this is how it turns out. It's just how my subconscious works.

I have no plans for a future Jemima Shore mystery, but would write one tomorrow if a good idea came to me.

The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.'

When I write something that would have made me laugh as a 10-year-old, or would have scared me or would have excited me, I know I'm onto something.

If you sing beautifully about nothing, no one will listen. If you sing badly about great stuff, no one will listen. Ideas are everywhere, but my theory is that a writer doesn't just think of an idea: they perform them.

I think the reason I wrote screenplays for nearly a decade was because it was my territory. I could stake that out.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

Basically, I just write whatever story grabs me rather than considering the genre.

My instinct is to absolutely recoil when talking about writing in a mechanistic way. Nothing could be dumber than writing a film or TV script based on prescriptions, on other peoples' ideas of what character should be.

In every novel, I write about something - a place, an experience, an emotion - with which I'm intimately familiar, but it's also crucial to me that I take on challenges. If write only inside my comfort zone, I'll suffocate.

I try and make little stories. Whether it's with a pencil or with bits of records, it's really the same thing.

I sat down and wrote what I remembered about being nine, and that eventually became 'Amelia's Notebook.'

I think people who write for kids, we have that ability to go back into our own lives.