Books Quote by P.D. James

“What is imagination? I don’t believe in fiction. In my mind everything comes from a part of who a writer is.”

— Anonymous

When the writing is really working, I think there is something like dreaming going on. I don't know how to draw the line between…

— John Hersey

“The novel is an event in consciousness. Our aim isn't to copy actuality, but to modify and recreate our sense of it. The novelist…

— George Buchanan

“When I write, I go to live inside the book. By which I mean, mentally I can experience everything I’m writing about. I can…

— Tanith Lee

“... but some say that reality is what happens inside a writer's head, and it is fiction which takes place outside it.”

— Barry A. Whittingham

“In the end it reveals a lot more about the person doing the imagining than it does about the person being imagined.”

— John Green

Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others

— William Gibson

It's a complex thing when you're writing a novel, because so much of it is conscious and planned and deliberate, and so much of…

— Benjamin Alire Saenz

“I believe that there are people who think as I do, who have thought as I do, who will think as I do. There…

— Sylvia Plath

You can start imagining all kinds of things characters would feel, but you have to have a sense of whether those imaginings might be…

— Jennifer Egan

“I think that a writer should observe the real world before imagining a non-existent one.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

“... except when I get down and write...then I let my imagination go to places I never knew existed and my characters invade my…

— Mark Alders