A Quote by Jonathan Dee

That's really the essence of what any fiction writer does. Some of it is research-based, but most of it is a really long-term, imaginative, empathetic effort to see the world the way someone whose experiences remote from yours might see it. Not every writer works that way; some writers make a wonderful career out of writing books that adhere very closely to how they view the world. The further I go with this, the more interested I get in trying to imagine my way into other perspectives that at first seem foreign to me.

Jonathan Dee

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Adhere Any Based Books Career Closely Does Effort Empathetic Essence Every Experiences Fiction Fiction Writer First Foreign Further Get Go How Imaginative Imagine Interested Long Long-Term Make Me Might More Most My Way Other Out Perspectives Really Really Long Remote Research See Seem Some Someone Term Trying Very View Way Whose Wonderful Works World Writer Writers Writing Yours

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Jonathan Dee
American - Novelist
Born: 1962

I think what people really want is fiction that in some tiny way makes their life more meaningful and makes the world seem like a richer place. The world is awfully short on joy and richness, and I think to some extent it’s the fiction writer’s job to salvage some of that and to give it to us in ways that we can believe in.

Wells Tower

Being a fiction writer is really like being an actor, because if you're going to write convincingly it has to sound right and play right. The only way that works is to emotionally and technically act out and see the scene you're in. There's no better job in the world, because when I sit down at that computer I'm the world's best forensics expert, if that's what I'm writing about that day. Or I'm some crazed psycho running down a dark alley. Or I'm a gorgeous woman looking to find a man that night. Whatever! But I'm all of those things, every day. How can you beat that?

Ridley Pearson

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

Rachel Kushner

I was writing at a really young age, but it took me a long time to be brave enough to become a published writer, or to try to become a published writer. It's a very public way to fail. And I was kind of scared, so I started out as a ghost writer, and I wrote for other series, like Disney 'Aladdin' and 'Sweet Valley' and books like that.

K. A. Applegate

I have a process that I seem to always, to some degree, as a writer, adhere to, but I certainly have never imposed the way I write a novel on my students. When I had students, I never said, "You should never start writing a novel until you have the last sentence." I never did that, and I wouldn't do it now, but people now seem so interested in the process [of writing fiction] that I have to constantly make it clear when I describe mine that I'm not being prescriptive. I'm not proselytizing.

John Irving

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

I care about actors, and I understand them in a very personal way. I'm not saying every writer has to do that, but in my case, it's been helpful. I can put myself into the scene and think, 'What would it be like to act this?' Any writer who's really good probably does that to some extent.

Winnie Holzman

When you find a writer who really is saying something to you, read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there and elsewhere. Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is really marvelous.

Joseph Campbell

You can't really get the full joy out of life unless you really go for it. You just have to go into it and stay under some kind of hope or illusion that it's going to work. But as you get older, or the more experiences you have, or whatever it is that tells you how this stuff works, you also know that if you go all the way into it, there's the risk of losing everything but you don't have a choice.

Wayne Coyne

I'm very interested in people who seem very negative and nasty and to go inside their world and see why they get that way. It makes you a little more sympathetic to them, even though I really don't want to be around those people.

Natalie Portman

Every writer writes in different ways, and so some write the music first, while others write the lyrics first, and some write while they are doing other things, and it is just nice to see how other writers are writing.

Valerie June

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

I've had so many experiences with film or musicals or books where I just walk away changed in some way. One of the things that makes me want to be a writer is to pour my heart into something and hope that I can affect someone in that same way.

Tom Kitt

And then I met Jerry and he's such a creative fiction writer, and I don't know if there's ever been a team put together the way we are - where one person does the theological way out and suggestions, and the other person goes into the cave and does the fiction writing.

Tim LaHaye

The most important thing for a writer to do is to write. It really doesn't matter what you write as long as you are able to write fluidly, very quickly, very effortlessly. It needs to become not second nature but really first nature to you. And read; you need to read and you need to read excellent books and then some bad books. Not as many bad books, but some bad books, so that you can see what both look like and why both are what they are.

Augusten Burroughs

Writers, some of us, may tend to see things before other people do, things that are right there but aren't noticed in the way that a writer might notice.

Don DeLillo

A Quote by Jonathan Dee

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