Story Creation Quotes

When you have really good writing, you're compelled by the actors who are in it, and you may think it's the actors or the design or the filmmaking of it, but then you're like, 'Well, the base is a really rich story that these guys have created.'

I would spend my time telling stories or writing them.

I like to have a much greater base and know a lot more about my character before I begin to fill the person. So a lot of it really entails sit-downs with them, determining who she is, where she came from, and why she reacts a certain way, and then I was really able to expand upon a lot of that and create a lot of that story on my own.

In making up stories, as in reading stories, I could create a contained world in which an experience is shared in its entirety.

I did not want to write a story about the invasion of Earth, so I had to create a race capable of living nearby, which meant to either on the Moon, on Mars, or on Venus. I picked Venus.

I was too lazy to start a whole new story, so I just stuck a princess into the story I was working on... and The Princess Diaries was born!

Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.

My business is can I create a world that's possible and could happen? I think that's the only thing that I have to do, and I think that I have done that each time.

I write a story in my head. I see the story like a movie.

I use everything. Turning life into stories is how I make sense of my experience. No matter how weird or disturbing or upsetting to me personally, it all finds its way in there.

As a small child, I could watch anything happen and tell a story, and it was funny.

In my experience, a novel is the culmination of various thoughts and impressions collected over time, until something comes along to give them a shape, to turn them into a story.

Sometimes good stories are created while documenting dreams.

But writers INVITE ghosts, maybe; along with actors and artists, they are the only totally accepted mediums of our society. They make worlds that never were, populate them with people who never existed, and then invite us to join them in their fantasies. And we do it, don't we? Yes. We PAY to do it.

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

I've written original material before, where I've come up with the idea and the characters myself, and that's definitely very different to working with someone else's characters and stories.

I like to read fiction best and I like to write fiction, too.

I don't remember my father reading to me, but I remember him telling me bedtime stories. I got to pick what was in them, and then he'd make them up.

Someone has to write all those stories: why not me?

Usually with film writing I start with characters, and set about writing their story.

On the whole, stories don't write themselves.

I wrote 'Mud' for Matthew McConaughey and had never met him.

My father was a really sharp cartoonist and filmmaker. He used to tape-record the family surreptitiously, either while we were driving around or at dinner, and in 1963 he and I made up a story about a brother and a sister, Lisa and Matt, having an adventure out in the woods with animals.

Good stories are constructed, not found.

Writing is a weird thing because we can read, we know how to write a sentence. It's not like a trumpet where you have to get some skill before you can even produce a sound. It's misleading because it's hard to make stories. It seems like it should be easy to do but it's not. The more you write, the better you're going to get. Write and write and write. Try not to be hard on yourself.