I don’t think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It’s essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

I got interested in reading very early, because a story was read to me, by Hans Christian Andersen, which was ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ and I don’t know if you remember ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ but it’s dreadfully sad. The little mermaid falls in love with this prince, but she cannot marry him because she is a mermaid.

I cannot say for certain if there is such a thing as love at first sight, but I do know that the moment I first glimpsed Winnie Nomzamo, I knew that I wanted to have her as my wife.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

With action films, it’s great if it’s not just driven by action, but by a good story and interesting characters, as well. Though, there’s nothin‘ like kicking butt!

How we experience memory sometimes, it’s not linear. We’re not telling the stories to ourselves. We know the story; we’re just seeing it in flashes overlaid.

I take my wife everywhere, but she keeps finding her way back.

I’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Be amusing: never tell unkind stories; above all, never tell long ones.

I really haven’t had that exciting of a life. There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life. So I pretty much like to make it up. I’d rather tell a story about somebody else.

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It’s a story.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

I don’t know the law, the kind of law of quantity and quality, but I think the opportunity of people being able to express themselves and to have the means of production is a great thing. It’s also changing how we’re telling stories.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do – that’s what I mean to do.

I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known.

The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.

‚Love Story‘ is actually about a guy that I almost dated. But when I introduced him to my family and my friends, they all said they didn’t like him. All of them!

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

I just try to write songs that people are going to have a dialogue about.

At school I pretended I had a normal life, but I felt lonely all the time and different from everyone else. I never felt like I fit in, and I wasn’t allowed to participate in after-school activities, go to sports events or parties or date boys. Many times I had to make up stories about why I couldn’t do anything with my classmates.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

Put a love note in his shaving kit before he leaves on a business trip.

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

I never saw any of my dad’s stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.

I love Los Angeles, and it’s been very good to me, but if everyone is running around telling the stories, who’s living them? You don’t play characters that are celebrities – you play guys who know what to do when their septic tank’s blocked.

I got my love of animals from the Dr. Doolittle books and my love of Africa from the Tarzan novels. I remember my mum taking me to the first Tarzan film, which starred Johnny Weissmuller, and bursting into tears. It wasn’t what I had imagined at all.

I could hardly sit through ‚Frozen.‘ There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.

It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

I like being a writer.

I spend a great deal of time with the President. We have a very close, personal, loyal relationship. I’m not, as they say, a potted plant in these meetings.

Love grows by giving. The love we give away is the only love we keep. The only way to retain love is to give it away.

I’m such a good lover because I practice a lot on my own.

The thing about impressing your girlfriend is that when you do something like a private island in Fiji, it’s all downhill from that point.

For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.

I think I belong to America’s last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

There is but one way for a president to deal with Congress, and that is continuously, incessantly, and without interruption. If it is really going to work, the relationship has got to be almost incestuous.

As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

When I see a story, I ask: is this something I’d like to be in? Is this something I’d like to see? And if I’d like to see it, would I like to tell it?

Mature love is composed and sustaining; a celebration of commitment, companionship, and trust.

As a writer, as a creator, I’m giving you my experiences. But just take what I give you. You ain’t got to pry beyond that.

It’s about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness – sonic goodies.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

I’m never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.

My relationship with the mountains actually started when I was 16. Every year, a group used to be taken from Auckland Grammar down to the Tangariro National Park for a skiing holiday.

People may think I’m trying something new by telling stories, but they’re just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That’s what I do.

A special effect is a tool, a means of telling a story. A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.

Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.

You are a child of the sun, you come from the sun, and that is something true with the Earth also… your relationship with the Earth is so deep, and the Earth is in you and this is something not very difficult, much less difficult then philosophy.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it’s always just one person encountering the book, it’s not an audience, it’s one to one.

In fairy tales the bad guy is very easy to spot. The bad guy is always wearing a black cape so you always know who he is.

It’s not always been a happy marriage. I guess I wanted a quick fix.

My wife and I tried two or three times in the last 40 years to have breakfast together, but it was so disagreeable we had to stop.

God and I have a great relationship, but we both see other people.

Everyone has at least one story, and each of us is funny if we admit it. You have to admit you’re the funniest person you’ve ever heard of.

You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit.

I kept a very full diary of my relationship with Nixon, for some strange reason, until he became president.