Virginia Woolf Quotes

There are no really new stories anymore.

When you're writing something that is truly original it takes time.

I don't write the same book over and over - I think if I did that, I would stop writing. I couldn't write a series with the same character, and I couldn't write a romance novel over and over again that takes place at a different beach every year. That's not who I am.

We pulled them [ Bink & Gollie] out of our feeble little brains.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

I think a badly crafted, great idea for a new film with a ton of spelling mistakes is just 100 times better than a well-crafted stale script.

For me, it would be pointless to write a novel that I knew I could complete within a specific length of time. I could do that only by repeating something I had done before, and I've never wanted to do that.

Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.

To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.

When I try to write I try to write something different every time. That's the challenge.

Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

One day I had an idea for a movie. Everything came after that.

I think the idea of creating a character from scratch, one that has not been done in a novel or an existing story, is immensely exciting, terrifying and ultimately rewarding.

I don't believe that anything's totally invented... If you're completely inventing a story, there wouldn't be an urge to tell it.

I just admire people like Woody Allen, who every year writes an original screenplay. It's astonishing. I always wished that I could do that.

Use creativity and storytelling as your main muscle instead of smartness.

I have to believe everything I write is brand new and I'm writing in this way about these people in a completely new situation for the very first time.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

There are very few people who are creative and imaginative. Therefore, fiction is difficult for people to embrace.

I see myself as a story teller.

Mostly I sat down and said, 'I'm not going to write a boring story.' And that actually, surprisingly, solves most of your problems.

I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories.

Every time I write a new book, I want to push myself to try something different.

Each new book is a tremendous challenge.