A Quote by Dan Poynter

Fiction writers can’t be trusted. They make things up.

Dan Poynter

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Fiction Fiction Writer Fiction Writers Make Things Trusted Up Writers

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Dan Poynter
American - Author
September 17, 1938 - November 3, 2015

We're trying to make something that lasts in language and there's no question that many fiction writers began as poets and it's hard for me to think of any good fiction writers who don't also read poetry.

Edward Hirsch

I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.

Walter Mosley

Fact is often stranger than fiction because most writers of fiction try to make their stories plausible.

Richard Posner

There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don't know any of these writers.

Nancy Kress

I really need to know where I'm going with fiction to write it in a way that at least I'm happy with. And I really think that a lot of fiction books end badly because terrific writers said, "I'll just figure it out" and plunge in, but have created so many problems that they are kind of impossible to solve. I mean, I'm talking really good writers do this and you can tell when they got to the end they either had to do something preposterous or they just don't really resolve things. So for fiction I spend a lot more time outlining and for humor I really don't do much of it.

Dave Barry

Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.

Ray Bradbury

We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

Neil Gaiman

The fiction I've written and published is certainly inflected by the work of authors I was reading or translating at the time. One of my methods for developing my own voice in fiction, a process I am taking very slowly and deliberately, is through these very intense encounters with certain writers. Strength and power in fiction is being able to resist these intoxicating voices, recognizing that they are the signatures of other writers and not one's own.

Adam Morris

When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry. And the reason for that is because the fiction writers seemed to need to learn how to pay greater attention to language itself, to the way that language works.

Edward Hirsch

I love science fiction. I always have, ever since I was a kid. I love a lot of science fiction writers. William Gibson is one of my favorite writers.

Tahmoh Penikett

As writers, our job is to try to create, in a fake space, something that feels true. That's just straight-up fiction: Invent a character that doesn't exist; make them seem like they do.

Craig Mazin

I was looking at a lot of experimental writers, and I was very intrigued by short-short fiction, writers who would write little things, what I call buttons now, little vignettes.

Sandra Cisneros

There are certain kinds of people who write science fiction. I think a lot of us married late. A lot of us are mama's boys. I lived at home until I was 27. But most of the writers I know in any field, especially science fiction, grew up late. They're so interested in doing what they do and in their science, they don't think about other things.

Ray Bradbury

I write fiction. I make things up, it's what I do.

Michael Morpurgo

Prose gets divided up into fiction and nonfiction and short fiction and long fiction and autobiographical nonfiction and so on. Poetry can do any of those things except with the added definition of intensified formal pressure.

Robert Hass

Creative non-fiction is such a liberating genre because it allows the non-fiction writer, whether he or she be journalist or essayist, to use all of the techniques of the fiction writer and all of the ideas, creative approaches, that fiction writers get a chance to use, but they have to use it in a true story.

Lee Gutkind

A Quote by Dan Poynter

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