Nicholas Sparks Quotes

Sometimes, I get ideas from dreams. Often, my stories are based on adventures that I, or my friends, have actually lived.

Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life.

If you're going to be an artist, real life is your inspiration.

I like fictional stories - like, things that never happened but the seed of it starts as real.

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

I create fictional narratives, but it's based on literal people.

I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.

I love sitting at my desk and facing a quiet day with a pen in my hand, and putting myself into a story. It's kind of weird, isn't it? I mean, to absent myself from real life and make up stories is strange, but I started doing this when I was ten years old. It was all I wanted to do.

I have to live my books before I write them.

I've never been comfortable with the idea of using family and friends in stories. Which is why it takes me longer than something else. Because you make them up out of nothing. Doing that is harder.

What do you do in a novel? You take recognizable characters from your own life, and you fantasize about what they're really like.

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 often have trouble falling asleep at night, so when I'm lying in bed I think up stories. That's where I do a lot of my thinking. I also get a lot of ideas while I'm reading - sometimes reading someone else's stories will make me think of one of my own.

All of my novels are seeded in real life events, and 'The Wreckage' is no different.

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.

I take stuff from real life and try to make a character out of it. And I try to live the world of the characters a little bit.

I needed my life as a springboard for my fiction. I have to have something solid under my feet when I write. I'm not a fantasist. I bounce up and down on the diving board, and I go into the water of fiction. But I've got to begin in life so I can pump life into it throughout.

So much of what I write in fiction is based on true stories.

I just love that feeling of being in another world, of creating characters and watching where they go.

I've written 17 novels, and I've found out that fiction can't keep up with real life.

Many of my characters first came through to me as voices. That's why I use a tape recorder.

But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories.

It is true that some of my fiction was based on actual events. But the events took place after the fiction was written.

Sometimes you have to search for inspiration with characters, and other times, they just drop out of the sky and arrive.

I find it inspiring and I always think when I'm working on something new, whether it's a new kind of character or a new kind of story or new kind of camera, it gets my creative wheels spinning.