A Quote by Alain de Botton

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.

Alain de Botton

Quote Topics

Essay Fiction Love Novel Personal Rather Than Uncomfortable Writing Writing Fiction

Quote Author

Alain de Botton
English - Writer
Born: December 20, 1969

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.

Alain de Botton

Writing has to do with truth-telling. When you're writing, let's say, an essay for a magazine, you try to tell the truth at every moment. You do your best to quote people accurately and get everything right. Writing a novel is a break from that: freedom. When you're writing a novel, you are in charge; you can beef things up.

Nicholson Baker

'Flaubert's Parrot' is an amphibious book in which what appears to be a personal essay about Flaubertian writing is gradually, delicately transformed into an extremely sad novel in which the differences between character, author, and narrator are less clear than they appear at first glance.

Alvaro Enrigue

If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.

Salman Rushdie

The essay is one of my favourite forms of writing, and I feel like what's inside is really personal, more so than with shorter pieces.

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation; it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice.

Joyce Carol Oates

I find it interesting that authors of fantasy and science fiction novels are rarely asked if their books are based on their personal experiences, because all writing is based on personal experience. I may not have gone on an epic quest through a haunted forest, but the feelings in my books are often based on feelings I've had. Real-life events, in fantasy and science fiction, can take on metaphorical significance that they can't in a so-called realistic novel.

Malinda Lo

I would much rather not be the center of attention, and I'd much rather travel and be writing my novel, rather than standing on a stage and trying to get people to understand something.

Willis Earl Beal

I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.

Alexander Chee

I love the writing of Walter Tevis and what he views as the possibilities of science rather than science fiction.

Roger Deakins

They say truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, but there's such a thing as believability when you're writing a novel.

Kevin Kwan

Writing grew out of the pleasure of escape. My novels are very much outside of my personal experience. That is why I love writing fiction. It allows me to leave my existence and inhabit other lives.

Danielle Trussoni

The essay I had to read was called, "An Essay on Criticism" by Alexander Pope. The first challenge was that the essay was, in fact, a very long poem in "heroic couplets". If something is called an essay, it should be an essay.

Maureen Johnson

Now the truth is, writing is a great way to deal with a lot of difficult emotional issues. It can be very therapeutic, but that's best done in your journal, or on your blog if you're an exhibitionist. Trying to put a bunch of *specific* stuff from your personal life into your story usually just isn't appropriate unless you're writing a memoir or a personal essay or something of the sort.

Patrick Rothfuss

I love the secrecy of writing fiction. When I write a novel, I don't tell anybody what I'm doing. I'm living in my private world. And it's a great sensation.