I’m not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.

I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

Who sows virtue reaps honor.

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

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.

I’m a fantasy writer, called a fantasy writer. But there’s very little, apart from one or two basic concepts in ‚I Shall Wear Midnight,‘ which are in fact fantasy. You have sticks that fly, but they’re practical broomsticks, with a bloody great strap that you can hold on to so you don’t fall off. And you try not to use them too often.

There are thousands of boys being wasted daily to our country through being left to become characterless, and, therefore, useless wasters, a misery to themselves and an eyesore and a danger to the nation. They could be saved if only the right surroundings or environment were given to them at the receptive time of their lives.

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.

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it’s going to happen.

It’s easy to make an album full of great songs. But I want people to go for the ride. The songs have to make sense together.

Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education.

When a family film is done well, there’s a character that every member of the audience can relate to. I want to be one of those guys.

My passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work rather than just a 16-bar verse.

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

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

It’s better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a terrific cost.

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

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

The best measure of a man’s honesty isn’t his income tax return. It’s the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

I love stories about women.

No evil propensity of the human heart is so powerful that it may not be subdued by discipline.

I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I’d written, I don’t want to leave that behind.

But I think we’re also just talking about the literacy of the audience. The visual literacy of the audience. They’ve seen so many images now, especially here in the States. There’s so much to look at, to watch. So the visual storytelling literacy is harder to impress.

When we see persons of worth, we should think of equaling them; when we see persons of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves.

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.

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing – if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it’s so drawn from my own life and my own stories.

I care not what others think of what I do, but I care very much about what I think of what I do! That is character!

I don’t plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn’t be a closed system – it’s a quest.

Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.

People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom. There’s just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.

People ask me if there are going to be stories of Harry Potter as an adult. Frankly, if I wanted to, I could keep writing stories until Harry is a senior citizen, but I don’t know how many people would actually want to read about a 65 year old Harry still at Hogwarts playing bingo with Ron and Hermione.

My fans don’t feel like I hold anything back from them. They know whatever I’m going through now, they’ll hear about it on a record someday. They’ll hear the real story. There’s a little bit of lag time. It’s not as instant as going on a gossip blog. But it’s much more accurate.

I’m entirely interested in people, and also other creatures and beings, but especially in people, and I tend to read them by emotional field more than anything. So I have a special interest in what they’re thinking and who they are and who’s hiding behind those eyes and how did he get there, and what’s the story, really?

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

I’m not searching for hard news; I’m not a journalist, but I’m interested in pushing to boundaries of where we can do the kind of stories that we want to do. I mean, it’s a big world and CNN has made it a lot bigger and they haven’t flinched.

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.

I’m sticking to the script, I’m putting that organic feeling back in the game.

I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

People are generally proud of their food. A willingness to eat and drink with people without fear and prejudice… they open up to you in ways that somebody visiting who is driven by a story may not get.

Maybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.

I love to watch videos, and I’ve always liked to film and take pictures. I have an eye for really weird things that nobody thinks about. I used to make little movies about myself and then edit them on iMovie.

You cannot be a hero without being a coward.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

I don’t write material. Funny things happen to me in the course of a day, and I just make notes.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You’re grateful for these different chances.

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

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.

A noble person attracts noble people, and knows how to hold on to them.

It’s probably not an accident that the films that I care about happen to be about issues that matter to me, stories that I want to tell.

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