Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.

I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.

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

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

Naturally, I mine my girlfriends' lives for good anecdotes and stories - so many of their experiences find their way into my books.

I always tell people, I never get writer's block because it's coming straight from my brain, like, real-life experiences. I'm like the news. I'm just reporting it for myself.

And, of course, there were some times when I had writer's block and I had a hard time figuring out how to express what I wanted to express.

The three things that help writing the most are living, writing, and reading. In that order.

I needed time to stand back and go through a lot more experience in life. Then I have something to write about, joke or to animate.

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.

For the years I spent working on it, 'Constellation' was the only novel I knew how to write, so maybe I still abided by the maxim? Regardless, I prefer the maxim: Write what you want to know, rather than what you already know.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

I tell my writing students that everything is material; just pay attention.

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

Sometimes I'm asked if I do research for my stories. The answer is yes and no. No, in the sense that I seldom plow through books at the library to gather material. Yes, in the sense that the first fifteen years of my life turned out to be one big research project.

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

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

In 25 years of writing novels, I've never had anything that felt like writer's block.

The biggest mistake you can make is assuming that creativity will hit you all at once and the muse will carry you to the end of the book on feather wings while 'Foster the People' plays gently in the background. Storytelling is work. Pleasurable work, usually, but it is work.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

I wrote 'Marvels,' which was about a guy who had two daughters, and I wrote 'Astro City Volume 2 #1,' which was about a guy who had two daughters. In both cases, about a year and a half or two years apart. And then after that, I had two daughters, about a year and a half or two years apart.

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

Part of a writer's job is just spacing out, looking into the air and imagining things.