A Quote by Matthew Pearl

I love writing shorter fiction.

Matthew Pearl

Quote Topics

Fiction Love Writing Writing Short

Quote Author

Matthew Pearl
American - Novelist

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

If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?

J. M. Coetzee

Strangely, I always have a lot of cut scenes. I keep writing shorter and shorter scripts, thinking that this time, I'll get all my scenes in.

David Twohy

It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.

Alexander Chee

Even though I always claimed that I didn't want to write about something - once I wasn't writing fiction, anyway; I think for me the change from fiction to poetry was that in fiction I was writing about something, in poetry I was writing something.

Vito Acconci

I cut up loads. I always want everything shorter, shorter, shorter.

Kate Moss

I'll be writing essays long after I've stopped writing fiction. There is this unusually broad range in the non-fiction, but if you look at what I'm capable of as a novelist, I'm more limited.

Geoff Dyer

The process of writing fiction is totally unconscious. It comes from what you are learning, as you live, from within. For me, all writing is a process of discovery. We are looking for the meaning of life. No matter where you are, there are conflicts and dramas everywhere. It is the process of what it means to be a human being; how you react and are reacted upon, these inward and outer pressures. If you are writing with a direct cause in mind, you are writing propaganda. It's fatal for a fiction writer.

Nadine Gordimer

I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

Roxane Gay

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

I wish I was a bit shorter, as I think shorter people have better walks. Freddie Fox, the actor, is shorter than me and has an amazing gait; and Tom Cruise has a brilliant run. I'm just gangly.

Jack Whitehall

All the definitions people want to put on you in terms of what kind of writer you are come with hidden meanings. If you're writing science fiction, you're writing rocket ships. If you write dystopian fiction, it's inequity where The Man must be fought.

Paolo Bacigalupi

I like to do the research of history and the creativity of writing fiction. I am creating this thing which I think is twice as difficult as writing either history or fiction.

Philippa Gregory

We know that people who are born with shorter telomeres than normal also have a shorter lifespan. We know that shorter telomeres can cause a shorter lifespan.

María Blasco Marhuenda

I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction that's about the irresponsibility of writing fiction and I've thrown out a lot of writing that I think was ultimately tainted by that kind of self-awareness.