Quotes About Imagination

You have to understand that while I pre-plot the meta story of a given book, I often have no idea of what will happen on the next page, let alone the next chapter. That's what makes it fun for me; I write the books the same way many people read them.

It's just a matter of me opening up the page and whatever is written on the page, that's what I'm here to do.

The writer creates the role on the page and then the actor takes it and makes it their own.

When I write I try as far as possible to forget I'm writing it at all. I tell it down onto the page, as if I'm telling it to one person only, my best friend.

When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.

The key thing is that you start every film from sort of a blank page, almost like you discover it like a child discovers a new world.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

I am influenced by books which don't have their eye on the endgame, but which try to be entertaining on each and every page.

I love... What's gratifying to me is when you make/create a character and a human being, a person who lives entirely and who has their own existence, just merely from the words on a page.

Film can be more of a reality than a page with words can ever be.

I like to write books that I would have liked as a child, that would have got me thinking and imagining beyond the words on the page. In a way, my audience is always how I remember myself as a child.

Spend more time working before you write page one. Then, the story - at least parts of it - will feel as though it is writing itself.

I see a lot of scripts, and very few of them leap off the page at you.

Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets.

As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.

And when I'm writing, I write a lot anyway. I might write pages and pages of conversation between characters that don't necessarily end up in the book, or in the story I'm working on, because they're simply my way of getting to know the characters.

I used to comfort myself with the idea of a book with serrated, detachable pages, so that you could read the thing the way it came and then shuffle the pages, like a giant deck of cards, and read the book in an entirely different order. It would be a different book, wouldn't it? It would be one of infinite books.

When I was about 8, I used to go into one of the rooms in the mansion, and I would open a magazine like the 'Ladies Home Journal,' and I would see these characters on the pages and then become them, talking back and forth.

In a way, my childhood was one long bunch of pages... I read and read and read.

When I see an image in my head that compels me, where there's this mystery about what's going to happen next or could happen next, I'll be intrigued. There are so many scripts that you read, and you know exactly what's going to happen, and there aren't too many where you can't tell within the first 20 pages where it's going.

It's easy to write a short story and frighten people for five pages, but to work at length, when you do it as in 'The Turn Of The Screw' or 'A Christmas Carol,' it's different; you have to build it and build it.

Inspiration is easy. The hard part is getting the inspiration onto 300 pages in an interesting, cohesive, easy-to-read but hard-to-forget story.

I think when I was 7, at school they got us all to write the story of Joseph and his brothers. I got a bit carried away and wrote 12 pages - everybody else wrote a page. The teacher was so impressed by it that she put it up on the wall for parents' evening. I thought, 'Oh, this is something that I really like that I also seem to be quite good at.'

When I write, I see the pages in my head, not the words.