Dave Morris

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Have confidence in your strengths, dear writer, or give it all up now and create apps instead.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“It is easy to force a reader or viewer to interact. The trick is in making them want to interact, and in letting the story unfold hand-in-hand with that.”

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

“Comics have always been storyboards.”

“Now, I admire The Sims as a game, but from a story viewpoint, there are two glaring problems. First, your relationship with those characters is like they're bugs in a jar. There's no empathy. And secondly, you've got this clunky, chemistry-set interface between you and them, with bars to show how tired or angry they are. It's all tell not show.”

“Storytelling isn't an Escher staircase.”