When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.

I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.

Writers turn dreams into print.

Of course, imaginative writing always contains elements of the writer’s lived experience, but there is a ­different sort of freedom in it than there is in reporting or in novels based on interviews.

It’s the beautiful thing about being a fiction writer; you can write the world you want to see.

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.

Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible.

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.

Everybody can write; writers can't do anything else.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It's not rocket science; it's habits of mind and habits of work.

People tell stories all the time: the stories they want told, where any story could be changed or warped this way or that. (p84)

For me, the pleasure of writing comes with inventing stories.

Success as a writer is within the grasp of whoever can tell a story on paper that people want to hear, and is willing to persist, to put up with boredom, frustration, and anxiety.