Best fiction & writing Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 6

“I want to do some fiction writing, I've had some pretty good luck with short stories, I'd like to do a couple of larger things.”

Want Writing Stories Fiction Couple Luck Short Story Good Luck Fiction Writing

Author:Janis Ian

“It's very hard to be a screenwriter. I remember getting a couple of awards. I got a PEN West award a million years ago when I did Running on Empty, and I sat in the room with all these writers. They wrote everything from novels to non-fiction to children's books to journalism - any kind of writing - and I realized that there was no one in the room who would ever read anything I'd written.”

“The good thing about writing fiction is that you can get back at people.”

People Writing Fiction Good Things Get Back Writing Fiction

Author:John Grisham

“[A] science fiction story is one which presupposes a technology, or an effect of technology, or a disturbance in the natural order, such as humanity, up to the time of writing, has not in actual fact, experienced.”

Writing Facts Stories Humanity Order Natural Fiction Technology Effects Science Fiction Disturbance Natural Order Fiction Stories

Author:Edmund Crispin

“Science fiction, as I mentioned before, writes about what is neither impossible nor possible; the fact is that, when the question of possibility comes up in science fiction, the author can only reply that nobody knows. We haven't been there yet. We haven't discovered that yet. Science fiction hasn't happened.”

Knows Writing Facts Fiction Impossible Happened Havens Possibility Science Fiction Come Up Nobody Knows

Book:To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction

Source: To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction

“Fiction writing is a strange business when you think about it. You sit down and weave a network of lies to explore deeper truths.”

Thinking Writing Lying Fiction Strange Down And Deeper Fiction Writing

Author:Wally Lamb

“I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.”

Thinking Writing Song Literature Stuff Fiction Phases Apprenticeship

Author:Kazuo Ishiguro

“The science fiction I write comes from a pretty deep pool of literature, not just from the reflection of other science fiction films, and I think that gives me somewhat deeper roots.”

Thinking Giving Writing Film Literature Fiction Reflection Roots Give Me Science Fiction Deeper Pool

Author:Jon Spaihts

“The reason we write fiction is because it's so much easier to exist spending part of each day in an imaginary world.”

World Writing Reason Fiction Easier Spending Each Day Imaginary Imaginary World

Author:Kurt Vonnegut

“Don't outline your stories. A lot of fiction workshops say you should. I say the opposite. I quote Grace Paley: "We write what we don't know we know."”

Knows Should Writing Stories Fiction Grace Opposites Should I Outlines Workshops

Author:Andre Dubus

“When I write fiction, I never try to deliver a message; I just want to tell a story. But I admit that I want the story to be memorable and the characters to touch the reader's heart.”

Want Writing Trying Heart Character Stories Fiction Reader Messages Memorable

Author:Isabel Allende

“When I am writing political op-eds, I do think carefully about the impact of my words. When I am writing fiction, it's a different story. In my fiction I am more reckless. I don't care about the real world until I am done with the book.”

Thinking World Writing Book Different Real Done Stories Care Political Fiction Impact Don't Care I Don't Care Real World Reckless Writing Fiction

Author:Elif Safak

“My first and biggest love was always fiction writing. But it is a very lonely pastime.”

Writing Firsts Fiction Lonely Fiction Writing Pastime

Author:Etgar Keret

“There was a price to be paid for being interested in fiction and in writing, pushing my family away. Books and authors became my family.”

Writing Book Fiction My Family Paid Pushing

Author:Garrison Keillor

“I have been writing mainly fiction. Occasionally there will be a song that hangs around the truth a little more than the rest, but even with those I end up fudging the facts just to keep it from going stale.”

Writing Littles Has Beens Ends Facts Song Fiction Stale

Author:David Bazan

“I use non-fiction work written by Whites in my research. It's indispensable. That wasn't the problem. I said that "The Wire" was a cliché! It's like my writing a series about Jewish life and casting all of the characters as inside traders.”

Writing Said Character Use Problem Fiction Written Research Series Indispensable Casting Wire Non Fiction Traders Jewish Life

Author:Ishmael Reed

“In high school, in 1956, at the age of sixteen, we were not taught "creative writing." We were taught literature and grammar. So no one ever told me I couldn't write both prose and poetry, and I started out writing all the things I still write: poetry, prose fiction - which took me longer to get published - and non-fiction prose.”

Writing Stills Age School Literature Fiction Creative Taught High School Prose Grammar Creative Writing Non Fiction Sixteen Prose And Poetry

Author:Margaret Atwood

“What I find interesting and heartening, though, is that there does seem to be a shift in the subject matter being written about by women that is doing well in the culture. We're seeing more women writing dystopian fiction, more women writing novels set post-apocalyptic settings, subjects and themes that used to be dominated by men.”

“Even when I think of writing fiction, it's being kind of a liar, a storyteller, a weaver, and there's that sense of how much of this is your life. The story is a way you unravel your life from behind a mask.”

Thinking Way Writing Kind Stories Behinds Fiction Mask Liars Be Kind Storyteller Writing Fiction Weavers

Author:Edwidge Danticat

“I'm writing books. They're still a mix of fact and fiction and will continue to be. I think it's an interesting place to work.”

Thinking Writing Stills Book Facts Interesting Fiction Writing A Book Interesting Places Fact And Fiction

Author:James Frey

“The easiest songs to write are pure fiction. There is no limit to how you can tell the story. I find it difficult when I'm replaying an event through a song.”

Writing Stories Song Difficult Fiction Events Pure Limits

Author:Jason Mraz

“If it's commercial fiction that you want to write, it's story, story, story. You've got to get a story where if you tell it to somebody in a paragraph, they'll go, "Tell me more." And then when you start to write it, they continue to want to read more. And if you don't, it won't work.”

Ifs Want Writing Stories Fiction Paragraph

Author:James Patterson

“I used to write my own versions of famous tales, such as William Tell or Robin Hood, and illustrate them myself, too. When I entered my teens, I got more into horror and science fiction and wrote a lot of short stories. A literary education complicated things and for many years I wrote nothing but poetry. Then I got back to story-telling.”

Writing Years Stories Used My Own Fiction Horror Science Fiction Complicated Tales Versions Short Story Teens Hood Robins Robin Hood Complicated Things

Author:Peter Robinson

“You bet I write disaster fiction. We have compiled a disastrous record on this planet, a record of stupidity and absurdity and self-abuse and self-aggrandizement and self-deception and pompousness and self-righteousness and cruelty and indifference beyond what any other species has demonstrated the capacity for, which is the capacity for all the above.”

Writing Self Fiction Records Planets Capacity Abuse Species Stupidity Disaster Cruelty Deception Indifference Righteousness Absurdity Self Deception Self Righteousness

Author:John Irving

“Never believe that the fiction writing life makes sense.... It's insanity by definition.”

Writing Believe Fiction Definitions Make Sense Insanity Writing Life Fiction Writing

Author:Jo Beverley

“...You believe that the kind of story you want to tell might be best received by the science fiction and fantasy audience. I hope you're right, because in many ways this is the best audience in the world to write for. They're open-minded and intelligent. They want to think as well as feel, understand as well as dream. Above all, they want to be led into places that no one has ever visited before. It's a privilege to tell stories to these readers, and an honour when they applaud the tale you tell.”

“For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.”

Thinking Writing Kind Book Reality Seems Faces Language Religious Fiction Meditation Modern Enlightenment Finals Plot Shifting Modern Life Ambiguity Texture Neat Quaint

Author:Don DeLillo

“I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.”

Writing Past Fiction Thirty

Book:Conversations with Grace Paley

Source: Conversations with Grace Paley

“Autobiographical writings, essays, interviews, various other things... All the non-fiction prose I wanted to keep, that was the idea behind this collected volume, which came out about few years ago. I didn't think of Winter Journal, for example, as an autobiography, or a memoir. What it is is a literary work, composed of autobiographical fragments, but trying to attain, I hope, the effect of music.”

“There's a difference between doing memoir and writing a novel. If I had put the story of the boy killing my dog - and that was Eric also, what a little monster he was! - in a novel, even if I took it directly from life, it would be fiction.”

Ifs Writing Littles Stories Would Be Differences Fiction Boys Novel Dog Killing Monsters Memoir My Dog Eric Doing Me

Author:Paul Auster

“For example, when I was writing Leviathan, which was written both in New York and in Vermont - I think there were two summers in Vermont, in that house I wrote about in Winter Journal, that broken-down house... I was working in an out-building, a kind of shack, a tumble-down, broken-down mess of a place, and I had a green table. I just thought, "Well, is there a way to bring my life into the fiction I'm writing, will it make a difference?" And the fact is, it doesn't make any difference. It was a kind of experiment which couldn't fail.”

“When I started writing fiction it always seemed in retrospect (I didn't realise at the time) that it was always caused by environments rather than by incidents and characters.”

Writing Character Fiction Environment Realising Incidents Retrospect Writing Fiction

Author:Jonathan Meades

“When I was hired by the University of Washington extension school to teach the one-year fiction writing course - 96 classroom hours - I quickly determined that I knew only about an hour's worth off the top of my head.”

Writing Years School Courses Hours Fiction Teach University Determined Classroom Extensions Fiction Writing

Author:James Thayer

“I researched fiction writing for months before I taught my first class, much of it looking for strong techniques from bestselling authors.”

Writing Firsts Strong Fiction Class Taught Months Technique Fiction Writing First Class

Author:James Thayer

“I think it's hard to write a book about happiness because fiction requires tension and complication.”

Thinking Writing Book Hard Fiction Tension Complication

Author:Edwidge Danticat

“For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.”

Writing Dream Reading Fiction Balance Findings Historical Historical Fiction

Author:Anthony Doerr

“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

“If I had a nickel for every time someone told me apologetically "I don't read fiction," I wouldn't have to write fiction anymore. And I share that fascination with the truth. I'm not looking down my nose at it.”

Ifs Writing Fiction Share Noses Fascination Looking Down Nickels

Author:Ron Currie Jr.

“The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it's how you teach yourself to write.”

Thinking Writing Firsts Stories Fiction Teach Late Twenties Short Story Teens Writing Short Writing Short Stories

Author:Jess Walter

“Writing is very castrating in the moment. Fiction in general, it has no function, nobody asks for it.”

Writing Moments Asks Fiction Function

Author:Etgar Keret

“I often give this metaphor where I say that writing short fiction is like surfing, while writing a novel is like navigating with your car. So when you navigate with your car, you want to get somewhere. When you surf, you don't want to get somewhere, you just don't want to fall off your board.”

Want Giving Writing Fall Fiction Novel Car Metaphor Boards Surfing Surf Navigate Writing Short

Author:Etgar Keret

“If I describe a person's physical appearance in my writing, which I often do, especially in fiction, I never say someone is "black" or "white." I may describe the color of their skin - black eyes, beige skin, blue eyes, dark skin, etc. But I'm not talking about race.”

Ifs Writing May Persons Eye Black Dark White Race Fiction Talking Color Skins Blue Appearance Etc Not Talking Blue Eyes Black Or White Black Eyes Physical Appearance Dark Skin

Author:Jamaica Kincaid

“The resistance to my work, and to my way of writing, has been there from the beginning. The first things I wrote were these short short stories collected in At the Bottom of the River, and at least three of them are one sentence long. They were printed in The New Yorker, over the objections of many of the editors in the fiction department.”

Way Writing Firsts Long Has Beens Stories Three Fiction Rivers Bottom Sentences Resistance My Way Department Editors Short Story Printed New Yorkers Objections One Sentence

Author:Jamaica Kincaid

“So much history, if you or I were to write it, could seem a fiction. These separations, these lines that tell us this is fiction or non-fiction, that this is history or this is a novel, are often useless.”

Ifs Writing Seems Lines Fiction Novel Separation Useless Non Fiction

Author:Jamaica Kincaid

“The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.”

Ifs Writing Literature Fiction Limits Science Fiction

Author:Aleksandar Hemon

“If Fobbit leaves a reader feeling stranded in some bland in-between territory, then I haven't done my job. But having said all that, I didn't consciously write the book with a particular moral intent. I took what I experienced and processed it through the sausage factory of fiction. It's up to readers to interpret what's on the page - as is the case with any novel.”

Ifs Writing Said Book Done Feelings Jobs Fiction Moral Cases Novel Havens Particular Reader Pages Territory Factories Sausage Bland Stranded

Author:Dave Abrams

“In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.”

Thinking Writing Persons Book Feelings Term Fiction Treasure Length Fiction Writers

Author:Lauren Groff

“The triumph of writing fiction is that by doing so, writers can build a more ideal world in themselves.”

World Writing Fiction Ideals Triumph Writing Fiction Ideal World

Author:Lauren Groff

“Fiction is always a utopian task, in that there's an ideal you hold in your head as you write which inevitably fails in the moment of creation, in the insufficiency of words to convey meaning, or in the way the work is completed in the reader's head.”

Way Writing Moments Fiction Failing Creation Reader Ideals Tasks Utopian Insufficiency

Author:Lauren Groff

“For me, the historical and genealogical library is the one I use. I'm working on, I'll say, it's a time travel novel. I haven't written very much of it. That's the dirty secret of the Cullman center: The writers don't write their fiction there, they just do their research.”

Writing Use Secret Fiction Novel Written Havens Research Historical Library Dirty Time Travel Dirty Secrets

Author:Andrew Sean Greer

Fiction Quotes

Related topics

Fiction Quotes