Quotes About Creation

What is missed when people talk about books is the moment of grace when the reader creates the book, lends it the authority of their life and soul. The books I love are me, have become me.

I tend to spend a lot of time building characters that the reader will believe in and sympathize with.

When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible.

In terms of the secrets that imbue and underlie 'Fall on Your Knees', they were as much of a mystery to me as I was creating the story as they are to the readers.

There are many challenges I face while working on a book. Working within deadlines and schedules is certainly one of the bigger ones for me. I want to create the best possible book I can for my readers with words and pictures - and that takes time to get it just right.

In the act of reading, especially reading fiction, where a world is being created, all kinds of matters of belief come into play.

Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. The notion that it is the occasion for our cleverness fills me with baffled bitterness and anger.

There's that old cliche that art is never finished, only abandoned. That's the nice thing about comics. It forces you to abandon it long before maybe you're ready to let it go.

An album is like a child and after a while I was ready to give birth!

I've heard that Alfred Hitchcock said that by the time he was ready to shoot a film, he didn't even want to do it any more because he'd already had all of the fun of working it out. It's the same thing with these Frank comics.

I believe in books that do not go to a ready-made public. I'm looking for readers I would like to make. To win them, to create readers rather than to give something that readers are expecting. That would bore me to death.

Let me back up a little and tell you why I prefer writing to real life: You can rewrite. A novel, for example, can be cleaned up, altered, trimmed, improved. Life, on the other hand, is one big messy rough draft.

I take stuff from real life and try to make a character out of it. And I try to live the world of the characters a little bit.

The lovely thing about writing is, well, two things. One, writing fiction allows us to bring an order to our lives that doesn't exist in real life. And two, it allows us to create human characters that we know better than we will ever know anyone in real life.

When we think of the myth of the settling of the West, this is our creation myth. But because we think of it as mythology, not as real people interacting with other real people, we ignore the cost of human lives and blood.

To create a character who really interests you, try combining aspects of your favourite fictional character with a real person.

Each movie you do about a real person is like a painting, and you choose certain things in the painting that you want to pull out and you want to show.

I don't base any character on a real person, and really don't do composites either. I make them up.

The real power of comics is writing as you draw.

The Bible is the only credible guide either as to the real relationship between man and the earth and the great Creator of both or concerning the purpose of the creation of both.

I think an ashtray is the most fantastically real thing.

Writing is a real activity conducted in real time.

It was amazing feeling to be able to be involved in invention, but not just invention - the creating of a marketplace that had real value to add.

When I'm making my own record, it's real work for me.