Julian Barratt Quotes

Most people who are trying to write kind of sit in their basements and pull it out of their imaginations.

You have certain writing tools but generally creating something from nothing makes one quite mad and Cynthia and I are quite mad you know.

Authors are ordinary people who usually start to live apart, in the imagination, because they don't fit in with normal, healthy people.

A manuscript under way always gave me something to do; only while enduring the aimlessness between books was I truly glum.

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.

After 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' it took me a few months to shut out the world. I really had to turn off the Internet and sort of cloister myself away from the world again and sink into that psychic space to write again.

To be a dramatic writer takes hard work, talent, and discipline. And that's why I just make up crap.

It's true that it's a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.

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

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

Sometimes I feel that the people I'm writing are more real to me than the people around me. When you take that imaginative leap, you're living so much in that world.

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

I always have a story in my head that needs to be written, or at least I think I do. But I usually can't find the time to write it.

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.

I think that most of the children's writers live in the world that they've created, and their children are kind of phantoms that wander around the edge of it in the world, but actually the children's writers are the children.

I think the idea of creating a character from scratch, one that has not been done in a novel or an existing story, is immensely exciting, terrifying and ultimately rewarding.

I think part of what I like about being a fiction writer is that I can inhabit something that's beyond the limits of my own personality.

Take it from me: I really love making things up, which is why I write fiction for a living.

It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.

I don't think there's a shortage of material in the world. Or in my head. I just pray for continued good health, because I've got other stories to tell.

To some extent, all authors are a little schizophrenic. We lead most of our lives in solitary confinement, living and breathing the books that we're writing.

I've lost much of my heart and the spark or fire that once 'created,' or produced, the art of fiction.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

I like going back and writing fiction.