J. Courtney Sullivan Quotes

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.

As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

I was 12. Our, teacher made us write an autobiography and I realised that I wasn't very interesting. I began to make things up, and that's when I thought maybe I was a writer, or at least a fiction writer.

A work of fiction is conceived very much the same way as a dream occurs in the mind of a sleeper. But a lot of it is imagination. It's not based on real people.

I take in a lot of stuff from real life, movies, television, news and it all gets mixed in my head and somehow turns into a story idea.

A writer is an artist. They're creating things out of thin air.

A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.

A notion for a story is for me a confluence of real events, historical perhaps, or from my own memory to create an exciting fusion.

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

That's the miracle of fiction. I use it to spray on certain moments or places from my youth.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

I fill up the well of stories in my head - without ever knowing I'm doing it.

He just kind of talks them through, and then I get the fun part cause I get to make up the stories.

A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.

The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.

Most of my story ideas come from my childhood. Sometimes they hatch from stories my parents told me, sometimes they come from experiences in my own life, and sometimes they are inspired by mere moments.

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

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.

There are a few really fantastic stories left, and that kind of gives you some inspiration to find even new ones.

The characters emerge from my rather twisted mind. That's another enjoyable part of the job making stuff up.

All stories come from the subconscious - which is why it doesn't make sense to over-plan.