“You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up.”
“When you are writing a novel, you aren't making it up. The story is already there. You just have to find it.”
“The writer's job is not to write a novel, hold it up and say, “Here I am,” but to write a novel, hold it up and say, “Here YOU are.”
“Fiction writing is great, you can make up almost anything.”
“You must write as if Dostoyevsky himself will be reading your novel, and Shakespeare will be acting it out.”
“When you put something down that happened, people often don't believe it; whereas, you can make up anything, and people assume it must have happened to you.”