C. S. Lewis Quotes

Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. (Notice this means that if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about...)

Write what you care about, what interests and intrigues you.

Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!

No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.

Readers would email me and say, 'Please write a novel about so-and-so,' but it has to come from yourself and not so much from your readership.

I prefer writing originals.

I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.

It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it.

You have to write the story that's at the front of your head. There is no point in trying to write for the market; it won't ring true.

Whenever I have tried to write for other people, that's when my writing has failed, when nobody wanted to read it or buy it. But it's only when I've been able to write a story that makes me excited, only then have other people wanted to read it.

I write from my imagination, not from what I've read in books or seen on TV or to make money. I wrote from an idea I was passionate about.

So Liam and movies are obviously big passions, and I read and write.

Write the story you need to tell and want to read. It's impossible to know what others want, so don't waste time trying to guess.

Relevance, for me, is about being creative and doing things that you believe in, whether that's music or acting or painting a picture, or whatever that is.

You can only write your own vision.

I just try to write literally what I love. That's usually the barometer that I use. As trite as it sounds, I'm like, 'what would I want to see? What would I be excited about?'

I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it's self-consciousness.

What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.

I don't *ever* write about real people. Art is supposed to be better than that. If you want a slice of life, look out the window.

The difficulty in the way of writing a children's play is that Barrie was born too soon. Many people must have felt the same about Shakespeare. We who came later have no chance. What fun to have been Adam, and to have had the whole world of plots and jokes and stories at one's disposal.

I start writing, pull whatever images happen to occur to me and make up a story, instead of starting with details that are real and I know of and going from there.

The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far in between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.

Mainly, I try not to think about my readers as I write - I just think of my characters and myself - If they're interesting to me, my hope is that they'll be interesting to others as well.

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.

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