Story Origins Quotes

Every ongoing character has to start somewhere.

In terms of the mechanics of story, myth is an intriguing one because we didn't make myth up; myth is an imprinture of the human condition.

No matter what writers say, most stories are about ourselves. The facts might change a little, but not much.

Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.

True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale.

On some level, every story draws something from life experiences. Most of the time, it's just a matter of me pulling bits and pieces of my own past to help give characters or settings a little more life.

I got the idea for 'Throne of Glass' when I was sixteen. Music always inspires my books, and when I was listening to the 'Cinderella' soundtrack, I thought, 'What if Cinderella was actually an assassin who liked getting dressed up all pretty and going to the ball, but then she wouldn't mind kicking butt?'

All told, she owned fourteen books, but she saw her story as being made up predominantly of ten of them. Of those ten, six were stolen, one showed up at the kitchen table, two were made for her by a hidden Jew, and one was delivered by a soft, yellow-dressed afternoon.

I really think the Bible is a baseline where all stories come from. All of the zillion stories in the Bible provide inspiration for everything.

I wrote 'Ava Wrestles the Alligator' when I was 22 or 23. These people and that world have been evolving in me for a while. It's such a shift not to be in that world.

This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we're born into stories. I say we're also born from stories.

None of us know where our stories come from. That's why writers make fun of people who ask us where we get our ideas... because we don't know.

I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.

The short story that eventually grew into Constellation was the first fiction set in Russia that I'd ever written, and that was right around the time I was giving up on a doomed, never-to-be-seen first novel. While I saw it could be something bigger, in hindsight fortuitous timing was as responsible as anything.

Honestly, I get character ideas from the most inane places. Sometimes a song will give me an idea. Sometimes I will just hear a snippet of conversation that ends up having nothing to do with the book that emerges.

Most films are rooted in a book or a comic strip, but I don't go out there saying I want to do adaptations.

All fiction is based on truth - 'Madame Bovary' is based on a true story!

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

all stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.