Best fiction & writing Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 2

“My approach to 'Star Trek' was, 'I know science fiction, and I know screen writing.' That was very arrogant of me, but you really need to be a little bit arrogant to think that what you have to say is good enough to justify the expense of hundreds of thousands - now millions of dollars - to make an episode of the TV show.”

Thinking Knows Needs Writing Littles Enough Shows Stars Bits Fiction Millions Tvs Approach Little Bit Science Fiction Dollars Screens Justify Expenses Good Enough Arrogant Episodes Tv Shows

Author:David Gerrold

“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.”

“Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!”

Knows Way Writing Persons Done Moments Truth Lying Desire Speak Deals Emotion Fiction Events Details Length Peculiar Packs Inventing Fiction Writers Devious

Book:The Left Hand of Darkness

Source: The Left Hand of Darkness

“There are very real differences between science fiction and realistic fiction, between horror and fantasy, between romance and mystery. Differences in writing them, in reading them, in criticizing them. Vive les différences! They're what gives each genre its singular flavor and savor, its particular interest for the reader - and the writer.”

Giving Writing Real Romance Reading Interest Differences Fiction Fantasy Mystery Particular Reader Horror Science Fiction Genre Criticize Realistic Flavor Realistic Fiction

Author:Ursula K. Le Guin

“I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises.”

Writing Kind Courses Fiction Doors Science Fiction Very Good All Kinds Thrown Good Times Imitation Premises

Author:Ursula K. Le Guin

“When I say that I can write nothing but weird fiction, I am not trying to exalt that medium but am merely confessing my own weakness. The reason I can't write other kinds is not that I don't value & respect them, but merely that my slender set of endowments does not enable me to extract a compellingly acute personal sense of interest & drama from the natural phenomena of life.”

Writing Trying Kind Doe I Can Reason Values Interest Natural My Own Fiction Drama Weakness Mediums Endowment Slender Confessing Natural Phenomena

Author:H. P. Lovecraft

“I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.”

Writing Fiction Cases Imagine Novelists Writing Short

Author:William Gibson

“I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.”

Writing I Can Found Fiction Science Fiction Visuals Lazy Lacking Shorthand Specificity

Author:William Gibson

“Returning to writing fiction after 13 years away from it. Returning to the rootstock of my whole life as a writer. It's what I had wanted to be for my entire life, since I can remember, since my particular time immemorial. It's how I got my start as a writer.”

Writing Years I Can Whole Wanted Remember Fiction Particular Whole Life Writing Fiction

Author:Elizabeth Gilbert

“For the entire decade of my 30s and the early part of my 40s, I didn't write a word of fiction. I just left behind a dream of my life.”

Writing Dream Left Behinds Fiction Decades Left Behind

Author:Elizabeth Gilbert

“I think the thing that I lost in myself when I stopped writing fiction and the thing that I rediscovered and started mining again is, for lack of a better word, magic. It's the way you can brush up against the inexplicable and the mystical.”

Thinking Way Writing Lost Fiction Magic Mystical Brushes Inexplicable Writing Fiction Mining

Author:Elizabeth Gilbert

“I've always thought of my writing as a spiritual practice. But I think that fiction is the most supernatural kind of writing that you can do - because of the ways that the real and the unreal weave together to create something that feels more true than anything.”

Thinking Way Feels Writing Kind Real Together Spiritual Can Do Fiction Practice Unreal Spiritual Practice

Author:Elizabeth Gilbert

“My novels are in the literature section as opposed to the romance section of bookstores because they're not romance novels. If I tried to have them published as romances, they'd be rejected. I write dramatic fiction; a further sub-genre would classify them as love stories.”

Ifs Writing Stories Romance Literature Fiction Novel Love Story Genre Dramatic Rejected Sections Bookstores Romance Novel

Author:Nicholas Sparks

“I see myself as a novelist, period. I mean, the material I work with is what is classified as science fiction and fantasy, and I really don't think about these things when I'm writing. I'm just thinking about telling a story and developing my characters.”

Thinking Writing Mean Character Stories Fiction Fantasy Materials Periods Science Fiction Developing Novelists Science Fiction And Fantasy

Author:Roger Zelazny

“The thing is that my first novel, which was basically a mystery adventure story, won quite an important award in Spain for young adult fiction, and because of this it became a very successful book, and right now it's some sort of a standard title, it's read widely in many high schools in Spain, so I think, in a way, I was a victim of my own success in the field of young adult fiction, because it was never my own natural register. I never intended to write that kind of fiction, but I became very successful at it.”

“Most of what I do is science fiction. Some of the things I do are fantasy. I don't like the labels, they're marketing tools, and I certainly don't worry about them when I'm writing. They are also inhibiting factors; you wind up not getting read by certain people, or not getting sold to certain people because they think they know what you write. You say science fiction and everybody thinks Star Wars or Star Trek.”

People Thinking Knows Writing War Certain Stars Fiction Worry Fantasy Wind Tools Science Fiction Marketing Factors Labels

Author:Octavia Butler

“It's interesting how many science fiction writers get going when they are very young. I was on a program with Greg Bear and he mentioned that he had gotten started writing when he was eight. And I began writing when I was 10. I think we're influenced by the stuff, we find it and we love it and we're influenced by it....I know I collected my first rejection slip when I was 13, and I went on collecting them for a long time after that.”

Thinking Knows Writing Firsts Long Young Stuff Interesting Fiction Bears Long Time Program Science Fiction Eight Rejection Slips Collecting Fiction Writers

Author:Octavia Butler

“Everyone has a bizarre childhood and unusual life experiences, whether they know it or not. There's no such thing as a normal childhood. What's useful in writing weird fiction is learning how to understand and articulate those moments of personal, particular strangeness.”

Knows Writing Moments Fiction Childhood Particular Normal Unusual Life Experience Bizarre Strangeness

Author:Kelly Link

“Topiary has always seemed like a good occupation, comparable in some ways to writing short fiction.”

Way Writing Fiction Occupation Writing Short

Author:Kelly Link

“Although The Terminator is arguably the more visionary of the first two films, [Terminator 2] is the more visually and viscerally satisfying. It's an exhausting experience and, even 18 years after its release (as I write this review), few films have matched it within the science fiction genre for sheer white-knuckle exhilaration.”

Writing Years Firsts Two Film White Fiction Science Fiction Release Genre Reviews Satisfying Sheer Visionaries Exhausting Matched Exhilaration Knuckles Terminator 2

Author:James Berardinelli

“Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.”

Ifs Knows Writing Has Beens Fiction Yeah Professors Writing Fiction

Author:Dean Wesley Smith

“I enjoy the writings of all of these authors and they have been very inspirational for me. But I think that it is important as writers of metaphysical, New Age, occult fiction and nonfiction to not take ourselves too seriously.”

Thinking Writing Has Beens Important Age Enjoy Fiction Nonfiction Metaphysical New Age Rama Occult Fiction And Nonfiction Very Inspirational

Author:Frederick Lenz

“When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. However beautiful it looked, it needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.”

Writing Children Literature Fiction Four Needed Comfortable Legs Genre Height Chairs Length

Author:Mark Haddon

“When you're writing a script you have the option to embellish on life or switch the order of events or make it generally more cinematic. I would stick too closely to my own experience and not necessarily think about the fact that it needs to have an event happen. Realising that I could channel my own experience into a story that was slightly more cinematic was a very important moment for me - allowing myself to accept that the kind of screenwriting I'm doing is a work of fiction.”

Thinking Needs Writing Kind Important Moments Facts Stories Happens Order My Own Fiction Accepting Events Sticks Scripts Allowing Realising Screenwriting Cinematic Important Moments

Author:Lena Dunham

“You can write a whole fiction, and you're talking to people who have gone through that, in real life. But the truth of it is that when you're talking to those people, you don't care about your movie anymore. You just want to hear about what they have gone through. You want all of the details. It's amazing.”

People Want Writing Real Whole Care Fiction Talking Gone Details Don't Care Real Life

Author:Alfonso Cuaron

“In crime fiction, I just don't write the parts that aren't a thriller and it's exactly the same in my TV reporting - I distill the essence of the story until it's only the jewels of the tale - and leave in only the most compelling and exciting parts.”

Writing Stories Fiction Crime Tvs Essence Exciting Tales Compelling Jewels Thrillers Crime Fiction

Author:Hank Phillippi Ryan

“I never did write a biography, and I don't exactly know how to set about it; you see I have to be accurate and keep to the facts, a most difficult thing for a writer of fiction.”

Knows Writing Facts Difficult Fiction Know How Accurate Biographies Difficult Things

Book:The Life of Charlotte Brontë

Source: The Life of Charlotte Brontë

“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

“It is a sad paradox that when male authors impersonate women ... they are said to be dealing with 'cosmic, major concerns' - but when we impersonate ourselves we are said to be writing 'women's fiction' or 'women's poetry.”

Writing Said Fiction Majors Concern Males Paradox Cosmic Impersonate

Author:Erica Jong

“I love stories, but writing fiction is another craft and I don't feel as if I have it.”

Ifs Feels Writing Stories Fiction Love Story Crafts Writing Fiction

Author:Joan Larkin

“I don't really want to write fiction at all. I don't see why fiction is necessary when we have real life already confusing enough.”

Want Writing Real Enough Fiction Real Life Confusing

Author:Aaron Belz

“I think it's just too kinda juicy and compelling to imagine people in their private lives, but then half the time people's private lives are just so much more bizarre and Ted Haggard-like than you could ever imagine. It's almost hard to write fiction anymore.”

People Thinking Writing Hard Half Fiction Imagine Compelling Bizarre Private Life Juicy Haggard

Author:Jerry Stahl

“A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.”

Writing Trying Reason Reality Literature Fiction Distance Journalism Journalist Novelists Petty Fake People

Book:Mornings in the dark: the Graham Greene film reader

Source: Mornings in the dark: the Graham Greene film reader

“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

“The letter of application ... should be a masterpiece of fiction, papering over all the cracks. Get it properly typed on decent writing paper. Never let it run over the page, people get bored with reading.”

People Should Writing Running Reading Work Fiction Office Paper Pages Letters Bored Decent Cracks Application Masterpiece

Author:Jilly Cooper

“Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.”

Ifs Writing May Stories Seems Today Individual Fiction Essence Salvation Science Fiction Critics Philosopher Saved Core Thrive Crucial Corny Fiction Stories

Author:Isaac Asimov

“Dave Eggers is a prince among men when it comes to writing deeply felt, socially conscious books that meld reportage with fiction. While A Hologram for the King is fiction...it's a strike against the current state of global economic injustice.”

Men Writing Book States Felt Fiction Economic Kings Conscious Injustice Currents Strikes Dave Holograms Economic Injustice

Author:Elissa Schappell

“Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.”

Writing May Problem Science Fiction Solutions Science Fiction Inevitable Catastrophe Fiction Writers

Author:Isaac Asimov

“writing had to take the form of journalism. Not for me the Shangri-la of fiction. The rewards, if any, would have been too little and too late, the bailiffs were at the door. ... Two large bailiffs, they were, who visited frequently and smiled like grand pianos, the only really reliable men in my life. They told me what they were going to do and if they did it, woe was me.”

Ifs Men Writing Littles Has Beens Two Form Fiction Doors Late Rewards Journalism Piano Too Late Woe Shangri

Author:Jill Tweedie

“It takes a long time to write a book. I'm not going to spend that much time trying to deliver a message. The reason I do it is because I want to understand something myself. It's not a delivery device, it's an inquiry device. Didactic fiction to my mind never works. It backfires.”

Want Writing Trying Mind Long Book Reason Fiction Messages Long Time Devices Working It Inquiry Delivery Didactic Backfire

Author:Ruth Ozeki

“Writing fiction is a good way to inhabit other minds, if not other lives.”

Ifs Way Writing Mind Fiction Good Way Writing Fiction

Author:Sheila Heti

“When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.”

Way Needs Feels Writing I Can Seems Order Found Fiction Make Sense Writing Fiction

Author:Alice McDermott

“At DePauw, I was teaching writing and fiction. The things I wanted to teach, more than anything else, were form and theory of the novel, of narrative. I liked those classes.”

Writing Wanted Form Fiction Class Teach Novel Teaching Theory Narrative Teaching Writing

Author:Nic Pizzolatto

“I like rules. I like definitions, categories, and writing advice of all sorts. When I'm writing fiction, there are often a lot of things for me to try to get right at once, and rules help me to stay organized. But my favorite rule of all is that, ultimately, there are no rules.”

Writing Trying Helping Fiction Advice My Favorite Definitions Organized Help Me Categories Writing Advice Writing Fiction

Author:Bruce Holland Rogers

“The writing you allude to is a form of dissent, but it's also expressive of the need to evolve beyond what is turgid and stale in contemporary fiction.”

Needs Writing Form Fiction Contemporary Evolve Dissent Stale Expressive Contemporary Fiction

Author:Rachel Cusk

“The key of writing fiction isn't just to remove something that the reader or listener can easily imagine. It's not a matter of being coy, or withholding information. It's allowing for multiple possibilities, recognizing the complexity of human behavior, and making the world of a piece of fiction as marvelously confounding as the world we live in.”

“I'm pretty instinctual when I write, and I really like to get to a point where I'm writing where I don't know what's going to happen next. Usually when I get to that point, something will happen that I find intriguing or interesting, or that will push the fiction in a way that I really like.”

Knows Way Writing Happens Next Interesting Fiction Intriguing

Author:Brian Evenson

“I am a born novelist, which does not happen all that often. There are people who try to write for a certain time, then they become Ministers of Culture under de Gaulle, and they begin living their own fictions.”

People Writing Trying Doe Happens Certain Culture Born Fiction Ministers Novelists

Author:Gore Vidal

“In a sense, you're always mythologizing your life; it's always an effort to make yourself epic. At least in fiction you can lie and sort of justify your delusion about your "epicness." But when you're writing a memoir, you're trying to make your life epic and it's not - nobody's life is.”

Writing Trying Life Is Lying Effort Fiction Memoir Delusion Justify Epic

Author:Sherman Alexie

“The most difficult part of writing a book is not devising a plot which will captivate the reader. It's not developing characters the reader will have strong feelings for or against. It is not finding a setting which will take the reader to a place he or she as never been. It is not the research, whether in fiction or non-fiction. The most difficult task facing a writer is to find the voice in which to tell the story.”

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Fiction Quotes