A Quote by Michael Morpurgo

It gives me confidence to know that what I'm writing has a veracity of its own without me having to invent it. When I'm writing fiction, I must believe it to be true, or I can see no point in it.

Michael Morpurgo

Quote Topics

Be True Believe Confidence Fiction Gives Having Invent Know Me Must No Point Own Point See True Veracity Without Writing Writing Fiction

Quote Author

Michael Morpurgo
English - Author
Born: October 5, 1943

Nonfiction gives you subjects. Writing fiction I can have more fun, but I have to invent my subject.

Lynne Tillman

It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.

Flannery O'Connor

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

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 think that I had read so much fiction that the craft itself sort of sank into me. I didn't read any 'how to' books or attend any popular-fiction-writing classes or have a critique group. For many years into my writing, I didn't even know another author. For me, a lot of reading was the best teacher.

Ann Maxwell

Writing is what's important to me, and anything that helps me do that - or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation - is worth it to me. [It is] impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle.

Christopher Hitchens

There are many other writers whose work I admire tremendously, but none whose work struck me at just the right young age. Jack Vance taught me that speculative fiction, science fiction, could be wonderfully and liberatingly stylistic. It didn't have to be pulp stuff. He really changed my writing and my view of science fiction, so if nothing else, my little homage to him in the novelette I wrote for that anthology is my thank-you to him. He helped me see that any genre can have excellent writing in it.

Dan Simmons

Angela Carter's fiction blew me away and really instilled a passion for writing, bolstered by Vladimir Nabokov. But in general, I can't point to any one thing. I just always loved books and writing.

Jeff Vandermeer

Writing is writing to me. I'm incapable of saying no to any writing job, so I've done everything - historical fiction, myths, fairy tales, anything that anybody expresses any interest in me writing, I'll write. It's the same reason I used to read as a child: I like going somewhere else and being someone else.

Geraldine McCaughrean

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

People who write for reward by way of recognition or monetary gain don't know what they're doing. They're in the category of those who write; they are not writers. Writing is simply something you must do. It's rather like virtue in that it is its own reward. Writing is selfish and contradictory in its terms. First of all, you're writing for an audience of one, you must please the one person you're writing for. Yourself.

Harper Lee

I honestly believe that everything I know about the writing of non-fiction (or writing) could be engraved on the head of a pin with a garden hoe.

M. F. K. Fisher

I prefer to not be feeling like I'm having to be fake about things that are the most dear to me in terms of writing, which is something related to my own, personal writing. I mean, I've done tons and tons of fake writing.

Mandy Stadtmiller

I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don't even know what's going on with me until I'm writing.

Janet Fitch

There are two magic acts I want to pull off when I write. One is creating a feeling that when you're inside a book, you believe everything you're reading even when you know it's not true. And the second is an extension of that, which is you know it's not true, you know it's not real, but you believe it anyway. And it's that believing of the story that isn't real that attracted me to writing and storytelling in general.