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Fiction Quotes

“I had a 2-week courtship with a fellow student in the fiction workshop in Iowa and a 5-minute wedding in a lawyer's office above the coffee shop where we'd been having lunch that day. And so I sent a cable to my father saying, 'By the time you get this, Daddy, I'll already be Mrs. Blaise!'”

Father Fiction Week Minutes Students Office Fellows Lawyer Coffee Shops Lunch Daddy Cables Workshops Courtship Iowa Coffee Shop

Author:Bharati Mukherjee

“I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.”

Passion Literature Given Fiction Study Imagine Students Extraordinary Imagine That English Literature Love Passion

Book:Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn

Source: Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn

“But the sensibility of the writer, whether fiction or poetry, comes from paying attention. I tell my students that writing doesn't begin when you sit down to write. It's a way of being in the world, and the essence of it is paying attention.”

World Way Writing Attention Fiction Students Essence Pay Attention Sensibility

Author:Julia Alvarez

“As a student, I wrote English reports on science fiction.”

Fiction Students Science Fiction Reports

Author:Buzz Aldrin

“I took a great joy with inventing new kinds of mechanisms. I invented new kinds of machines. I've been a student of science fiction for a long, long time, and I'm very well-versed in science fact and science fiction.”

Wells Kind Long Facts Joy Fiction Students Long Time Machines Science Fiction Mechanism Inventing Great Joy

Author:Jack Kirby

“As a youngster, I read of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. As a student, I wrote English reports on science fiction. And as a fighter pilot, I observed the selection of the Mercury astronauts. All this was fascinating, but I really didn't think I would ever be a part of it. It was only when my good friend Ed White was selected as a Gemini astronaut that I decided to join NASA as part of the Apollo program.”

“I didn't study writing in school, I studied biology as an undergraduate and graduate student. So I think that I write fiction in the scientific way. I love invention, obviously; I love creation of character. But I do feel very rooted in the real world, even in the way that I create characters.”

Thinking World Way Feels Writing Real Character School Fiction Study Creation Students Invention Biology Real World Graduates Rooted Graduate Students Undergraduate

Author:Barbara Kingsolver

“I try to tell student writers to read as much as possible, not only literature but philosophy, theory, and to form obsessions. There's a big taboo in fiction creative writing workshops against using the self at all, and I think I try to encourage students to write the self, but to connect the self to something larger, which is to be this thinking, seeing, searching, eternally curious person, and that writing can come out of investigating and trying to understand confusion, and doubts, and obsessions.”

“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

“They [academy writing programs] have no concept that the world has changed, that publishing has changed, that filmmaking has changed, and if you're not constantly looking at your education model and adjusting for the change, you'll find yourself teaching antiquity. Like all of these programs that won't accept students who are writing genre fiction - what an institutional ego!”

Ifs World Writing Fiction Accepting Teaching Changed Students Ego Models Concepts Program Genre Finding Yourself Filmmaking Publishing Academy Antiquity Adjusting

Author:Tod Goldberg

“I've had many students over the years, sometimes even very sophisticated students, who will be writing and will hit a wall. Often I find it's because they're working out of sequence. Maybe some people can do that, but I don't think that's how fiction works. It's a discovery.”

People Thinking Writing Years Sometimes Can Do Fiction Students Wall Discovery Work Out Working It Sophisticated Sequence

Author:T.C. Boyle

“I feel engaged with young people in Pakistan. But that said, it's still a small minority that reads novels, literary fiction. But it isn't necessarily a small minority of the wealthy elite in the city of Lahore. It can often be and I often do meet at literary festivals students who've ridden a bus 12 hours from a very small town just to hear some of their favorite writers come and speak.”

People Feels Said Stills Young Speak Hours Cities Fiction Novel Students Towns Engaged Minorities Wealthy Bus Elites Pakistan Small Town Festivals Often Is Lahore

Author:Mohsin Hamid

“I have a process that I seem to always, to some degree, as a writer, adhere to, but I certainly have never imposed the way I write a novel on my students. When I had students, I never said, "You should never start writing a novel until you have the last sentence." I never did that, and I wouldn't do it now, but people now seem so interested in the process [of writing fiction] that I have to constantly make it clear when I describe mine that I'm not being prescriptive. I'm not proselytizing.”

People Way Should Writing Said Seems Lasts Process Fiction Novel Clear Students Mines Degrees Sentences Writing Fiction Proselytizing

Author:John Irving