Quotes from Dave Morris

My first memory of the public library is of lugging home a volume of Norse myths as heavy as a thunder-god's hammer.

Granted, a long book can be as daunting as a hard one. I nearly reached for 'Game of Thrones' until I saw the bookshelf sagging under the burden of those other volumes.

You don't get 'The Unfinished Swan' or 'Shadow of the Colossus' or even Telltale's 'Walking Dead' until you've sat through the long, linear infodumps of something like 'Metal Gear Solid'.

Comics have always been storyboards.

A well-written novel, the most immersive of all forms of storytelling, should command your full attention and belief.

As we get older, we demand stories that go somewhere. Things must change.

When you're a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work.

Literary fiction - if we must use the term - is not the plotless, meandering indulgence that its detractors would have you believe.

Publishers were ever eager for authors to do their own publicity because nobody else was willing to do it for nothing. But then it became clear that if you want somebody to champion the story, there's nobody better than the person who made it all up.

A very great deal is written about the future of book publishing - much more than on its present or past - and the only takeaway from all these oracles seems to be that a great empire will be destroyed.

My advice after thirty years in the business is sign with an agency of reasonable size.

When a medium like games or comic books whips up such a rapture of enthusiasm, naturally we look for lessons we should be learning.

In good writing, the contemplative and the exciting happen at the same time.

Readers prefer a world they can relate to.

Interactive storytelling emphasizes a personal connection with the characters. It is a powerful tool that can draw you so deeply into the world of a story that you lose sight of it as a story. You think you are there - at least, if it is done right.

There is a great insatiable hunger for good stories throughout the media.

'Breaking Bad' and 'The Shield' were planned right from the start so that their narrative trajectory would come down in a blaze of fireworks.

The writer must be a transcendent, not immanent, deity.

People nowadays think of gamebooks as rather old hat - and, after all, it was twenty years ago. In their heyday, though, they were a phenomenon, selling upwards of a hundred thousand units per title. And it's not as old hat as you might think: the same design skills I used in those days apply equally when I'm creating modern videogames.

Some have said that 'Frankenstein' is a story of a bad parenting giving rise to a troubled child.

I could put a sudoku at the end of every chapter and you'd have to solve it to progress through the story, but that doesn't address what would make people want to interact.

Back in the early 1970s, what got me and another 400,000 kids out of bed without needing to be called twice was the latest issue of The Amazing Spider-Man.

'War and Peace' goes down a lot smoother than a Dan Brown novel, let me tell you.

One of the gamebook series I created, 'Fabled Lands', is also the name of my company, and the reason we named the company after it is that it was pretty revolutionary for its time.