R. L. Stine Quotes

I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

I love the magic of stories and the power of stories.

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'

I've been falsely accused of drawing too much from real life. But I am a petty thief - I take little things. And, I mean, I can hardly write 10 words before I start to make things up. I start to invent, because that's what I want to do. I'm running away to an invented place.

I love fantasy. I grew up reading fantasy.

My interest in fantasy began pretty much when I started to read.

Most of my short stories are fantasy.

I don't actually have a one wellspring of inspiration. Though I'm most often inspired while reading - both fiction and nonfiction.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It's endless. I'm sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds.

What do you do in a novel? You take recognizable characters from your own life, and you fantasize about what they're really like.

Fantasy for me as a kid was real, and I had a fantasy about what life was, whether it was sort of wicked and dire, or wholly normal, or whatever. Anything really close to home is not, it seems to me, what a good book should be about.

I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination.

From a very young age, stories fuelled my imagination in the most wonderful way.

Anyone who has set out to invent a purely imaginary story knows that the whole thing is fantasy, from beginning to end; there must be a sense of magic created about the most restrained of naturalism.

I like fantasy.

I love the paranormal, because there, every genre I write can become one beacon for my imagination.

I always take a story that's kind of out there, like an urban myth. I take some possibility that people imagine, that they are familiar with, and try to turn it into a story.

I think writing is an extension of a childhood habit - the habit of entertaining oneself by taking interesting bits of reality and building upon them.

When I turned to writing fantasy, and writing for young people, it was joyous. It was like discovering an underground lake of ideas that went on forever.

The stories I write are often literal to events that have happened or observations that I've made, and sometimes they're fantastical.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.