Jonathan Stroud Quotes

When I'm writing my blog, I think of myself at 13 years old, back in St. Louis, daydreaming about Hollywood.

I imagine a child. That child is me. I can reconstruct and vividly remember portions of my own childhood. I can see, taste, smell, feel, and hear them. Then what I do is, not write about that kid or about his world, but start to think of a book that would have pleased him.

Readers would email me and say, 'Please write a novel about so-and-so,' but it has to come from yourself and not so much from your readership.

I prefer writing originals.

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.

For a writer, they say write what you know. As a performer, you find it in yourself, in your heart. You relate to the character. You try to live it, try to have it be real for you.

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.

I think that all stories - if you make movies about zombies and aliens - it has always to do with your personal story. If not directly, it is about your fears, your obsessions, things like that.

There are millions of people who think that romance isn't real writing. But the only person who can make you real, make your books real, is you.

What I always do is go with the stories that put up the hair on the back of my neck or make me cry or make me laugh.

Man, I live out 90 percent of my songs and the other 10 percent... once in a while, I'll put myself in someone else's shoes and try to go down that road.

I think I'm attracted to writers who tell us something about ourselves.

The hardest part is not to repeat yourself. I don't really believe my core obsessions are going to change, but you need to look for ways to express them that are different. The main reason for doing that is not to bore yourself, and obviously, I don't want to bore readers.

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

When I write stories I am like someone who is in her own country, walking along streets that she has known since she was a child, between walls and trees that are hers.

I like to write books that I would have liked as a child, that would have got me thinking and imagining beyond the words on the page. In a way, my audience is always how I remember myself as a child.

I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.

A boy's story is the best that is ever told.

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.

I just want to sit in my room and write books.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

When I was a kid, I read books that made me laugh but also made me shiver in terror. I wanted to make books that made other people feel the same way.

I do what I do because of Walt Disney. Goofy. Mickey Mouse. I never forgot how their films entertained me.

Writers do draw inspiration from their own lives, which, quite frankly, might be more interesting than fiction.