A Quote by Jennifer Haigh

Writing fiction, like reading fiction, is a practice in empathy.

Jennifer Haigh

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Empathy Fiction Like Practice Reading Reading Fiction Writing Writing Fiction

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Jennifer Haigh
American - Novelist
Born: 1968

Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry.

Neil Gaiman

Writing, or at least good writing, is an outgrowth of that urge to use language to communicate complex ideas and experiences between people. And that's true whether you're reading Shakespeare or bad vampire fiction-reading is always an act of empathy. It's always an imagining of what it's like to be someone else.

John Green

I spend my life writing fiction, so reading fiction isn't much of an escape. That's not always true, but I don't read much contemporary fiction.

Alan Furst

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

Paul Harding

I do teach fiction and non-fiction, and usually I'm interested in works that confuse genre, but I'm very new to teaching creative writing, I don't have an MFA, or a PhD, I tend to approach it just through my own practice.

Kate Zambreno

I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it appears to represent a disengagement from day-to-day life. But reading, and particularly the reading of fiction, encourages us to view the world in new and challenging ways...It allows us to inhabit the consciousness of another which is a precursor to empathy, and empathy is, for me, one of the marks of a decent human being.

John Connolly

I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.

Octavia E. Butler

As a kid, I went from reading kids' books to reading science fiction to reading, you know, adult fiction. There was never any gap. YA was a thing when I was a teenager, but it was a library category, not a marketing category, and you never really felt like it was a huge section.

John Allison

A couple of pieces of advice for the kids who are serious about writing are: first of all, to read everything you can get your hands on so you can become familiar with different forms of writing: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, journalism. That's very important. And also keep a journal. Not so much, because it's good writing practice. Although it is, but more because it's a wonderful source of story starters.

Ann M. Martin

In a sense, journalism can be both helpful and detrimental to a writer of fiction because the kind of writing you need to do as a journalist is so different. It has to be clear, unambiguous, concise, and as a writer often you are trying to do things that are more ambiguous. I find that writing fiction is often an antidote to reading and writing too much journalism.

Aravind Adiga

I can be very snobby about fiction, especially contemporary fiction. I can be kind of overly demanding, I think. But this is, I think, a good time. A lot of fiction comes out right now. So, I like reading the memoir. I love memoir, the biography, auto bio.

Annette Bening

Historical fiction is actually good preparation for reading SF. Both the historical novelist and the science fiction writer are writing about worlds unlike our own.

Pamela Sargent

I like to read fiction, and I particularly enjoy reading young adult fiction. But I also read children's books, adult books, current authors, and classics, but I like fiction the most.

James Howe

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory. This really came home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemd a kind of fiction, or vice versa. Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn't even there anymore... Warm with life, hopeless unstable.

Haruki Murakami

Writing fiction is very different to writing non-fiction. I love writing novels, but on history books, like my biographies of Stalin or Catherine the Great or Jerusalem, I spend endless hours doing vast amounts of research. But it ends up being based on the same principle as all writing about people: and that is curiosity!

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Before I started writing, I'd never read much fiction. I was more interested in non-fiction. I'm taking the same approach to theatre: I can operate from a position of ignorance and make up my own rules instead of being bound by customs and practice.

Irvine Welsh

A Quote by Jennifer Haigh

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