C. J. Cherryh Quotes

First sentences are doors to worlds.

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

I've always liked stories. I'm always reading, ever since I was a kid. I've always been reading and wanting to be in some other world.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

A mathematical proof is beautiful, but when you're finished, it's really only about one thing. A story can be about many things.

How many times can you put together 26 different stories without running out?

Neil Gaiman is a star. He constructs stories like some demented cook might make a wedding cake, building layer upon layer, including all kinds of sweet and sour in the mix.

If you're a fan of anything I do, I'm always telling a story. I'm into that - I like it when you don't know if it was true or not.

For a novelist, the gaps in a story are as intriguing as material that still exists.

In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

I think it's important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.

For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.

The world before us is a postcard, and I imagine the story we are writing on it.

It's not magic that takes us to another world - it's storytelling.

The inspiration really comes first from the character and the story. That vision of what the story is, and what the character is, the world that they inhabit and what the story wants to tell. That's really what inspires me.

Everything in the world was about creativity: belief and creation. Storytelling was the essence of both.

Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story.

The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories

Comics were a place where captivating images lit your imagination and showed you that you can create new kinds of people and worlds.

We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.

Dreams, books, are each a world.

No. I cannot expect you to believe it. Take it as a lie--or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest. And taking it as a story, what do you think of it?

The magical story is not a microscope but a mirror, not a drop of water but a well. It is not simply one thing or two, but a multitude. It is at once both lucid and opaque, it accepts both dark and light, speaks to youth and old age.