Research Inspiration Quotes

I got to spend all of my time every day at work reading and editing papers about cutting-edge technical research and getting paid for it. Then I'd go home at night and turn what I learned into science fiction stories.

When I was trying to figure out how the government might go about creating the camps in 'The Darkest Minds,' I researched the Japanese internment camps here in the United States, specifically propaganda the government used, and how they capitalized on people's fears.

When I find research really rewarding is when one piece of information gives you an idea for a story. That's when it's great.

Research is the historical novelist's map, constraint, and purest energy.

I imagined there would be a way to crack the diffraction barrier. But of course I didn't know exactly how it would work, but I had a gut feeling that there must be something, and so I tried to think about it, to be creative.

Research is about following the gleam into the dark. It's also about being sensitive enough to know which fact is "the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders," as opposed to the fact that deadens and kills a delicate new project.

I love throwing myself into people who actually lived. It gives me a lot to research and a lot to know.

Listening to the stories my colleagues are researching and grappling with - in terms of access to documents, psychological understanding of their subjects, artful composition and determination to extrapolate from an individual's life lessons and insights that we can all learn from - I am each time overwhelmed by joy.

When I started writing my second novel, I decided that one of the characters would have a passion for dollhouses, which allowed me to do hours of guilt-free 'research' online and at the Manhattan Dollhouse boutique inside F. A. O. Schwarz.

I'd studied 16th century science and magic. I thought it was strange that people were interested in the same kinds of things my research was about. The more I thought about it, the more intriguing it became and pretty soon I was writing a novel about a reluctant witch and a 1500-year-old vampire.

I am a story-teller, and I look to academic research... for ways of augmenting story-telling.

I hadn't seen 'The Purge' until I was trying to do the research for it. But it was my friends and my cousins, in particular, who came to me not too long before the audition process and asked me if I had seen it. They were talking about how great it was. I was engaged in the opportunity to do the film because of their intrigue with the franchise.

That's always the most productive research - research into tone, into voice. Facts are nice, too, but facts are more raw material than creative inspiration.