The thing about fantasy – there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.

I’ve started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I’d be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

There’s nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, ‚Well, okay, I’m going to do something of high artistic worth.‘

A lot of the time when I write about the person that I love, I feel like I’m writing about New York.

When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess.

I’m a writer, not a professional runner. It’s fun and it helps me write. I need powerful concentration.

The question isn’t, ‚What do we want to know about people?‘, It’s, ‚What do people want to tell about themselves?‘

I’ve often made revisions at that stage that turned out to be mistakes because I wasn’t really in the rhythm of the story anymore. I see a little bit of writing that doesn’t seem to be doing as much work as it should be doing, and right at the end, I will sort of rev it up. But when I finally read the story again, it seems a bit obtrusive.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

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 don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

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.

Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

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

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending!

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 went to see ‚Phantom of the Opera‘ with my grandma and my mom when I was very little. The stage, the voice, the music… Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has been a massive inspiration to me for some time – the storytelling, that deliciously somber undertone in his music.

I can tell you all kinds of moral tales, but fashion and reality are vaguely different.

All of my songs are autobiographical.

I’ve always appreciated a turn of phrase.

The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day’s work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.

I can’t consciously explain how people feel after reading my books. All is too personal.

I think it all comes back to being very selfish as an artist. I mean, I really do just write and record what interests me and I do approach the stage shows in much the same way.

I remember very little about writing the first series of ‚Hitchhiker’s.‘ It’s almost as if someone else wrote it.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.

I always have to be writing.

I don’t care much for equations myself. This is partly because it is difficult for me to write them down, but mainly because I don’t have an intuitive feeling for equations.

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

I became an actress because my mom wanted me to become an actress. It took me until my mid-30s to realize I actually didn’t. I actually wanted to write and direct and be more involved in politics and humanitarian issues.

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

If you can’t read, the only thing you can do is enjoy the pictures, not the whole story. Reading is the key to knowledge. Knowledge is the key to understanding. So read on, young man! Read on, young lady!

People love westerns worldwide. There’s something fantasy-like about an individual fighting the elements. Or even bad guys and the elements. It’s a simpler time. There’s no organized laws and stuff.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage.

I’ve never had writer’s block.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.

In the normal flow of a conversation, our attention is divided. We hear parts of what other people are saying, in order to follow and keep the conversation going. At the same time, we’re planning what we’ll say next, some exciting story of our own.

What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That’s what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

Language is the dress of thought.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it’s imaginary. You don’t have to pretend it’s not a book. We don’t have to pretend that people don’t write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn’t the only way to do it. Once you’re writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.

I woke up one day and thought: ‚I want to write a book about the history of my body.‘ I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

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.

I don’t like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can’t do it.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing – not the ‚what happens‘ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

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 is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.