Writing is for me like breathing.

Anyone can imagine a story. Writers imagine and get the story down on the page.

I nearly always write just as I nearly always breathe.

I don't have much of an imagination, but I have a mind bank of details, which I play with. It's how I daydream, so writing like that is natural for me.

I have said that nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction. The life, the opinions, are not the work, for it is in the tension between standing apart and being involved that the imagination transforms both. Let me give some minimal account of myself. I am what I suppose would be called a natural writer. I did not make any decision to become one. I did not, at the beginning, expect to earn a living by being read. I wrote as a child out of the joy of apprehending life through my senses — the look and scent and feel of things; and soon out of the emotions that puzzled me or raged within me and which took form, found some enlightenment, solace and delight, shaped in the written word.

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, I speak like a child.

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.

A perfect writer would make words sing, dance, kiss, do the male and female act, bear children, weep, bleed, rage, stab, steal, fire cannon, steer ships, sack cities, charge with cavalry or infantry, or do anything that man or woman or the natural powers can do.

That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.

In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

I started writing for the same reason I breathe-because I had to.

I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die. — Isaac Asimov