William Gibson Quotes

There's no game plan when it comes to thinking up new characters; inspiration can come from anything - from a wig I've seen to an expression I've heard someone use.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

Choosing to write a play is some kind of surrender. I don't make an outline. I sit and work, and suddenly the door opens, and out it comes.

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it's going to happen.

I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.

For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.

I sort of love reading the scripts and going, 'Oh wow, what a great idea. I never would have thought of that.'

Blank paper has always inspired me.

Stories come to me and I don't know where they come from, but afterwards I can look back and say, 'Oh yes, that's got a little bit of me, or a little bit of my own son in it'. That's where ideas come from.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

I like to sit down every day and not know where the book is going. I have no idea where the book is going to go or how it's going to end as I'm writing it.

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

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

I don't sit down in front of my computer screen and think, 'Right. Today I shall begin a story set in this or that period of history.' I just get ideas from the world around me.

Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.

What surprised me most while writing 'The Monogram Murders' was that everything I needed seemed to arrive in my head exactly when I needed it.

Writing is a mysterious process, and many ideas come from deep within the imagination, so it's very hard to say how characters come about. Mostly, they just happen.

Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.

It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.

I don't know what the secret is when I am writing it - it really is a surprise to me.

With me, writing is 60% imagination, 30% people you know and 10% you don't know where it comes from.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

I never know what I'm going to write next, and when I think I do I usually turn out to be mistaken.

I just let the character speak to me and things appear.

I write sentence to sentence. That's the kind of writer I am. I don't have a plot when I begin. I have to be convinced and I have to be surprised.