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“The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it's about and why you're doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising ("but of course that's why he was doing that, and that means that...") and it's magic and wonderful and strange.”

“You can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page. Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future.”

Fiction Novel Future Pages Harder Science Fiction Faster Fiction Novels

Book:Adventures in the Dream Trade

Source: Adventures in the Dream Trade

“The "great tradition" does not brook even the possibility of libidinal gratification between the pages as an end in itself, and FR Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy.”

Doe Ends Fiction Possibility Approach Pages Tradition Gratification Brooks Dichotomy Broccoli

Author:F. R. Leavis

“[Vathek] has, in parts, been called, but to some judgments, never is, dull: it is certainly in parts, grotesque, extravagant and even nasty. But Beckford could plead sufficient "local colour" for it, and a contrast, again almost Shakespearean, between the flickering farce atrocities of the beginning and the sombre magnificence of the end. Beckford's claims, in fact, rest on the half-score or even half-dozen pages towards the end: but these pages are hard to parallel in the later literature of prose fiction.”

“Blade Runner is a rare science fiction movie so full of material that pages can be written about it without scratching the surface. A review like this can provide little more than an overview. A detailed exploration of the movie, its style, and its mysteries requires dedication that only someone immersed in Blade Runner lore can provide.”

Littles Fiction Written Mystery Style Materials Pages Science Fiction Surface Exploration Reviews Dedication Runners Blades Blade Runner Science Fiction Movie Overview Scratching The Surface

Author:James Berardinelli

“Blindsight is excellent. It's state-of-the-art science fiction: smart, dark and it grabs you by the throat from page one. Like a C J Cherryh book it makes you feel the danger of the hostile environment (or lack of one) out there. And it plays with some fascinating possibilities in human development, and some disconcerting ideas about human consciousness. What else can I say? Thanks for giving me the privilege of reading this.”

“Nick Yablon ranges widely, from log cabins to skyscrapers and from Tocqueville to pulp fiction. He combines imaginative research with probing interpretation. Untimely Ruins offers fresh and challenging insights about the American built environment on nearly every page.”

Challenges Fiction Environment Offers Pages Research Built Insight Ruins Range Interpretation Imaginative Cabins Skyscraper Pulp Probing Log Cabins Built Environment

Author:T. J. Jackson Lears

“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

“History presents the pleasantest features of poetry and fiction,--the majesty of the epic, the moving accidents of the drama, the surprises and moral of the romance. Wallace is a ruder Hector; Robinson Crusoe is not stranger that Croesus; the Knights of Ashby never burnish the page of Scott with richer lights of lance and armor than the Carthaginians, winding down the Alps, cast upon Livy.”

Light Romance Moving Fiction Moral History Drama Pages Surprise Casts Stranger Accidents Features Epic Majesty Knights Armor Alps Hector Robinson Crusoe Winding Down

Book:Pleasures of Literature

Source: Pleasures of Literature

“I've always liked the fact that fiction takes all these pretty unquantifiable human feelings and experiences and projects them onto the page in ways that make interior human sense, even when they aren't entirely believable...”

Way Humans Facts Feelings Fiction Projects Pages Interiors Believable

Author:Scott Bradfield

“Screenwriting involves an often un-personal process. Co-writers, directors, producers, everyone has a say in what you put on a page, and stories are constantly changing according to budget, actors, and commercial needs. Films are a collaborative process and are also inherently narrative and structured, so you are always working within very tight parameters. Short fiction unleashes a more intimate voice and a passion for language. I believe short narratives can have the same amount of danger and drama as any action film.”

“The Heretic Queen is historical fiction at its best. Michelle Moran seamlessly incorporates accurate details into a story full of suspense, intrigue, and tenderness that's impossible to put down until you've reached the last page. An absolute triumph!”

Stories Lasts Fiction Impossible Pages Absolutes Historical Details Triumph Suspense Queens Historical Fiction Accurate Tenderness Intrigue Heretic

Author:Tasha Alexander

“A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first.”

Firsts May Lasts Fiction Steps Development Pages Glory Add Finals Artistic Evident Every Step

Book:The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Novels, Short Stories, Poems, Essays, Letters and Memoirs (Illustrated): The Scarlet Letter with its Adaptation, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, Tanglewood Tales, Birthmark, Ghost of Doctor Harris… (Including Biographies and Literary Criticism)

Source: The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Novels, Short Stories, Poems, Essays, Letters and Memoirs (Illustrated): The Scarlet Letter with its Adaptation, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, Tanglewood Tales, Birthmark, Ghost of Doctor Harris… (Including Biographies and Literary Criticism)

“On Stranger Than Fiction, the script was so good that I stuck to every line because it was just such brilliant writing from Zach Helm that I felt like I really just want to shoot the page.”

Want Writing Felt Lines Fiction Pages Scripts Stranger Brilliant Stuck Helm Stranger Than Fiction

Author:Marc Forster

“I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape”

Want Firsts Kind Different Next Process Fiction Shapes Computer Pages Research Notes What You Want Block Files Non Fiction

Author:Joan Didion

“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

“The art of fiction is one of constant seduction. You must persuade the reader on page 1 to start reading - on page 50, or page 150 and yes, on page 850.”

Art Reading Fiction Reader Pages Constant Seduction

Author:Marge Piercy

“I became much more interested in plot when I really didn't consider myself a writer anymore. When I was in an art context and I started to do installations, that was when writing of mine almost returned to fiction. Earlier I felt like I didn't have anything to write about, I could only concentrate on the page, I could only concentrate on words.”

Writing Art Felt Fiction Mines Pages Plot Installation

Author:Vito Acconci

“Poetry is a kind of gasp, and there it is, a spark on the page. Fiction, on the other hand, is like swamp fire.”

Kind Hands Fiction Fire Pages Poetry Is Sparks Swamps

Author:Joy Kogawa

“Sunshine takes its intelligent and honourable place in the history of grownup science fiction on the screen and on the page: a genre that seeks to break free of parochialism and think about where and why and what we are without the language of religion... I loved Sunshine for its radical proposal that humans can and will do something about a catastrophe, and that our weapons could be used up in the service of preservation.”

Thinking Humans Used Language Fiction Break Weapons Pages Intelligent Science Fiction Screens Radical Genre Sunshine Catastrophe Preservation Proposal Grownups Parochialism

Author:Peter Bradshaw

“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

“Journeys become very good metaphors. They always have the character put into circumstances that reveal him. If I had based my characters in New York and had them just sitting and thinking about life, it would be like what contemporary U.S. fiction is about. That is very heavy, literally, for me. It doesn't become mainstream enough because the pages don't turn themselves.”

Ifs Thinking Enough Character Would Be Turns Fiction Journey New York Circumstances Pages Sitting Very Good Metaphor Heavy Contemporary Mainstream Thinking About Life

Author:Karan Bajaj

“Every good story needs a complication. We learn this fiction-writing fundamental in courses and workshops, by reading a lot or, most painfully, through our own abandoned story drafts. After writing twenty pages about a harmonious family picnic, say, or a well-received rock concert, we discover that a story without a complication flounders, no matter how lovely the prose. A story needs a point of departure, a place from which the character can discover something, transform himself, realize a truth, reject a truth, right a wrong, make a mistake, come to terms.”

“Many Americans have never owned a book. And others have never owned a non-fiction book. Providing them with a 300-page paperback would get them started, maybe. And even if it didn't, at least they'd own that one. So that's a serious problem.”

Ifs Book Problem Fiction Serious Pages Providing Non Fiction

Author:James W. Loewen

“A lot of the despair we feel watching the news every day flows from our sense of helplessness, and as a fiction writer you get to control things, if only on the page. You get to run the show. You can right wrongs, bring departed loved ones back to life, even take vengeance on God, if that's your thing.”

Ifs Feels Shows Running Fiction Despair News Pages Flow Loved Ones Vengeance Helplessness Fiction Writers Departed

Author:Ron Currie Jr.

“As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.”

People Facts Differences Fiction Pages Concerned Fifteen Dictionary

Author:Charles de Lint

“If you read a book that's fiction and you get caught in the characters and the plot, and swept away, really, by the fiction of it - by the non-reality - you sometimes wind up changing your reality as well. Often, when the last page is turned, it will haunt you.”

Ifs Wells Book Sometimes Character Reality Lasts Fiction Wind Pages Caught Plot Swept Away

Author:Jodi Picoult

“It was an excess of fantasy that killed the old United States, the whole Mickey Mouse and Marilyn thing, the most brilliant technologies devoted to trivia like instant cameras and space spectaculars that should have stayed in the pages of Science Fiction . . . some of the last Presidents of the U.S.A. seemed to have been recruited straight from Disneyland.”

“Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.”

World Looks Book Eye Dies Turns Fiction Our Lives Pages Tales Slides Resumes American Gods

Author:Neil Gaiman

“Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.”

Source: Generosity: An Enhancement