Best fiction & able Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“If you take 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example of somebody who creates a new language in film by what he was able to accomplish with art direction, photography, lighting, etc., it is still a gold standard for science fiction.”

“I think every fiction writer, to a certain extent, is a schizophrenic and able to have two or three or five voices in his or her body. We seek, through our profession, to get those voices onto paper.”

Thinking Two Body Able Certain Three Voice Fiction Five Paper Profession Fiction Writers Schizophrenic

Author:Ridley Pearson

“I'm able to separate fiction and reality. I guess it remains to be seen if other people are.”

People Ifs Reality Able Fiction Remains Fiction And Reality

Author:Curtis Sittenfeld

“I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.”

Ifs Has Beens Art Able Fiction Narrative Filmmaker Visuals Cartoonist Visual Art

Author:Jonathan Lethem

“A good writer should be able to write comedic work that made you laugh, and scary stuff that made you scared, and fantasy or science fiction that imbued you with a sense of wonder, and mainstream journalism that gave you clear and concise information in a way that you wanted it.”

“What are the hallmarks of a competent writer of fiction? The first, it seems to me, is that he should be immensely interested in human beings, and have an eye sharp enough to see into them, and a hand clever enough to draw them as they are. The second is that he should be able to set them in imaginary situations which display the contents of their psyches effectively, and so carry his reader swiftly and pleasantly from point to point of what is called a good story.”

Should Firsts Humans Enough Stories Hands Seems Eye Able Human Beings Fiction Situation Reader Draws Clever Display Imaginary Competent Good Story Hallmark Psych

Author:H. L. Mencken

“Okay, this is Fran Lebowitz. She gave an interview once for the Paris Review about trying to write fiction and saying that fiction writers start talking about how characters are talking to them, and it's crazy, she's never had that. And I also thought, I'm never gonna be able to do this, because I didn't feel that for a really long time.”

Feels Writing Trying Long Character Able Fiction Talking Crazy Long Time Okay Paris Interviews Reviews Fiction Writers Really Long

Author:Sloane Crosley

“Until recently we’ve only been able to speculate about story's persuasive effects. But over the last several decades psychology has begun a serious study of how story affects the human mind. Results repeatedly show that our attitudes, fears, hopes, and values are strongly influenced by story. In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than writing that is specifically designed to persuade through argument and evidence.”

Writing Mind Humans Facts Stories Shows Seems Able Lasts Values Belief Results Attitude Fiction Study Psychology Effects Serious Evidence Argument Decades Human Mind Persuasive

Author:Jonathan Gottschall

“Did men but know that there was a fixed limit to their woes, they would be able, in some measure, to defy the religious fictions and menaces of the poets; but now, since we must fear eternal punishment at death, there is no mode, no means, of resisting them.”

Knows Men Mean Would Be Able Religious Fiction Poet Limits Eternal Punishment Fixed Woe Resisting Menace

Book:Lucretius On the Nature of Things

Source: Lucretius On the Nature of Things

“Seventeen years after its intial release, The Empire Strikes Back is still as thrilling and involving as ever. Because of the high quality of the original product, it doesn't show a hint of dating. Neither [Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope nor Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi] were able to match the narrative scope of Empire, which today remains one of the finest and most rousing science fiction tales ever committed to the screen.”

“C.S. Lewis says that fiction is able to sneak past the watchful dragons of religion. It becomes more powerful to speak in poetry. The song goes straight to the heart while the numbers and the math of it will never be able to reach that.”

Heart Able Past Song Speak Powerful Numbers Fiction Math Dragons Sneak

Author:Jon Foreman

“I say then, that belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain. This variety of terms, which may seem so unphilosophical, is intended only to express that act of the mind, which renders realities, or what is taken for such, more present to us than fictions, causes them to weigh more in the thought, and gives them a superior influence on the passions and imagination.”

Source: Essays and Treatises on several subjects, etc. New edition

“A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.”

Thinking Way Writing Said Two Book Able Order Fiction Grace Mines Creatures Chaos Patterns Novelists Guts Fragile Thread Spiders Envied Spun History Books Semblance

Author:Katherine Paterson

“I am very much afraid that to the fiction writer the fact that we shall always have the poor with us is a source of satisfaction,for it means, essentially, that he will always be able to find someone like himself.”

Mean Facts Able Poor Fiction Source Satisfaction Fiction Writers

Book:Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“A fiction which is designed to inculcate an object wholly alien to the imagination sins against the first law of art; and if a writer of fiction narrow his scope to particulars so positive as polemical controversy in matters ecclesiastical, political or moral, his work may or may not be an able treatise, but it must be a very poor novel.”

Ifs Firsts May Art Matter Able Law Political Imagination Sin Poor Fiction Moral Novel Objects Aliens Controversy Scope

Author:Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

“Truth is the most powerful thing in the world, since even fiction itself must be governed by it, and can only please by its resemblance. The appearance of reality is necessary to make any passion agreeably represented, and to be able to move others we must be moved ourselves, or at least seem to be so, upon some probable grounds.”

World Reality Seems Truth Able Moving Passion Powerful Fiction Please Truth Is Moved Appearance Most Powerful Resemblance

Author:Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury

“I'm not a moron, but science fiction to me requires a suspension of disbelief and honest curiosity or fascination in that kind of bullshit. I've just never been able to make that jump, really. I like things to be more organic.”

Kind Able Fiction Honest Science Fiction Curiosity Bullshit Fascination Disbelief Moron Suspension Suspension Of Disbelief

Author:Marc Maron

“Being able to create your own work, being able to indulge your own fantasies is so much better than journalism, so much more fulfilling than journalism, to me, that as long as I can continue to write fiction, I shall.”

Writing Long I Can Able Fiction Fantasy Journalism Fulfilling Indulge

Author:Tom Robbins

“That is as true for fiction or non-fiction. The writer has to really know their subject. It is really important to remember that the readers are a lot smarter than the writer. Also, good writing has to do with rewriting. You will never get it right the first time. So you rewrite and rewrite again until you get it right. Until you, and the reader, will be able to visualize what you're writing about.”

Knows Writing Firsts Important Able Remember Fiction Subjects Reader First Time Smarter Non Fiction Good Writing Rewriting

Author:Michael Scott

“In novels you're able to occupy character's internal thoughts and it's really hard to do in a film or a TV show. When you're reading a character's thoughts or when it's in first person, you're reading kind of their own story, so you have the opportunity to see what makes that character complex or complicated. And to me that's what the whole point of fiction is.”

Firsts Kind Persons Hard Whole Character Stories Shows Able Film Reading Opportunity Fiction Novel Tvs Complexes Complicated Internals Tv Shows First Person

Author:Joe Meno

“Many years ago I had two small children, and I wanted to be able to be home when they got home from school. And I didn't like the direction journalism was taking. I thought if I could write books, I could work at home and have the best of both worlds. I wrote my first mystery while still working full time, and it didn't sell, but the next one did sell, so I quit my job for the world of fiction. Scary, but I've never regretted it for a single day.”

“Memoirs have dominated the literary scene now for ten or 20 or even 30 years: most of them seem to use the conventions of fiction and it's astonishing how in so many of these books people seem to be able to remember conversations that took place when they were five years old and give three pages of coherent dialogue, which is utterly impossible.”

People Giving Years Book Use Seems Able Remember Three Fiction Five Impossible Scene Ten Conversation Pages Memoir Dialogue Five Years Conventions Astonishing Five Year Olds

Author:Paul Auster

“A favorite science fiction writer of mine is William Faulkner! It was an idea that came to me once, years ago, and I've never quite been able to shake it. This is facetious, on one level at least. There are telepaths in As I Lay Dying. But I think the most compelling thing for me is there are moments with him where I just feel these are not humans talking to each other. These are some hyper-intelligent, yet-to-be-born organisms. The way they look at the past without having any loss of knowledge everything that ever happened is still here.”

“That's the fine balance of a fiction writer...to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.”

Giving Kind Stills Enough Character Able Fiction Fine Balance Surprise Artistic Fiction Writers

Author:Alan Lightman

“I don't think it's always a sign of respect for persons (inside or outside of fiction) to pretend to be able to represent, to have access to, their multi-dimensionality at every moment. That doesn't imply people aren't multi-dimensional.”

People Thinking Persons Moments Able Fiction Access

Author:Ben Lerner

“Read non-fiction. History, biology, entomology, mineralogy, paleontology. Get a bodyguard and do fieldwork. Find your inner fish. Don't publish too soon. Not before you have read Thomas Mann in any case. Learn by copying, sentence by sentence some of the masters. Copy Coetzee's or Sebald's sentences and see what happens to your story. Consider creative non-fiction if you want to stay in South Africa. It might be the way to go. Never neglect back and hamstring exercises, otherwise you won't be able to write your novel. One needs one's buttocks to think.”

“I would not have majored in English and gone on to teach literature had I not been able to construct a counterargument about the truthfulness of fiction; still, as writers turn away from the industrious villages of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, I learn less and less from them that helps me to ponder my life. In time, I found myself agreeing with the course evaluations written by my testier freshman students:'All the literature we read this term was depressing.' How naive. How sane.”

Source: The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd

“When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.... Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”

Writing Looks Stills Able Courses Found Deals Fiction Quality Cases Modern Serious Reader South Realistic Southern Freak Grotesque

Author:Flannery O'Connor

“Our minds simply don't function in some sort of narrative chronology. I think that one of the great gifts of writing fiction is being able to think about that.”

Thinking Writing Mind Able Fiction Function Narrative Writing Fiction Great Gifts Chronology

Author:Dani Shapiro

“I read a fair amount [of science fiction], and you know it was certainly inspirational. I have to pinch myself to think that we might be able to make some of [what I've read in science fiction books] come true.”

Thinking Knows Book Might Able Fiction Amount Fairs Science Fiction

Author:Richard Branson

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