A Quote by Steven Amsterdam

Fiction demands structures and recognizable shapes. Big surprises only draw attention to the writer's hand.

Quote Topics

Attention Big Big Sur Big Surprise Big Surprises Demands Draw Fiction Hand Only Recognizable Shapes Structures Surprises Writer

Quote Author

Steven Amsterdam
American - Writer
Born: January 31, 1966

Don't try to make a big bluff on the turn with a drawing hand. With only one card to come, even a big draw is an underdog against a made hand. Keep the betting small.

Daniel Negreanu

I got to draw shapes. I really like to draw funky, geometric shapes. And I got to use just different fonts and make a joke of how feminine it was, but it didn't even have people in it. To me, it was so exciting and interesting to do that for a while.

David Rees

There's the fact that American fiction is basically the most apolitical fiction on the globe. A South American writer wouldn't dare think of writing a novel if it didn't allude to the system into which these people are orchestrated - or an Eastern European writer, or a Russian writer, or a Chinese writer. Only American writers are able to imagine that the government and the corporations - all of it - seem to have no effect whatsoever.

Michael Cunningham

Non-fiction is a big responsibility. Rationality. Facts. The urgent need to reflect some small aspect of reality. But fiction is a private autism, a self-referential world in which the writer is omnipotent. Gravity, taxes, and death are mere options, subject to the writer's fancy.

Katherine Dunn

I started to draw desert islands. They were just rough, shapes in the middle of the page. Then I began drawing shapes within those shapes and I was amazed how quickly the islands got better. It took off from there.

Billy Connolly

[The writer] must essentially draw from life as he sees it, lives it, overhears it or steals it, and the truer the writer, perhaps the bigger the blackguard. He lives by biting the hand that feeds him.

Charles R. Jackson

There are writers who draw immediate attention to the fact that it's fiction. And I like some of that, but it doesn't really have the power.

Ethan Canin

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

But the sensibility of the writer, whether fiction or poetry, comes from paying attention. I tell my students that writing doesn't begin when you sit down to write. It's a way of being in the world, and the essence of it is paying attention.

Julia Alvarez

I do not find illness an eminence, and I do not understand how people can use it to draw attention to themselves since the attention they draw is nearly always reluctantly given and unpleasantly carried out.

John Steinbeck

Making books has always felt very connected to my bookselling experience, that of wanting to draw people's attention to things that I liked, to shape things that I liked into new shapes.

Jonathan Lethem

No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.

Cynthia Ozick

No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, dont confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.

Cynthia Ozick

I view myself as a fiction writer who just happens to write nonfiction. I think I look at the world through a fiction-writer's eyes.