Top 1200 Fiction Writer Quotes & Sayings

I should think just about every young writer - which I was at the time - would be influenced by HPL. As an American writer of weird fiction, he was at the top of the class.

I'm a writer of fiction. I try to write about my time, but it's dangerous if I'm seen as an investigative writer. I manipulate and change and control.

Fiction makes your dreams come true, and, as a writer, fiction allows you to delve into the area of miracles.

I think all of us begin as writers. I wanted to be a writer from the time I as eight, long before I heard of jazz. The question is, once you have that obsession, what is your subject going to be and you often don't know for some time. It might become fiction, it might be non-fiction, and if it's non-fiction it can go in any number of directions.

I think I view myself primarily as a fiction writer. Poetry is more of a "hobby," a time of rest from the hard work of writing fiction.

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.

I meet a number of people as a writer of fiction who say "Oh, I don't read much fiction," as if the history of the United States, just as an example, isn't an exercise in storytelling and myth-making.

I read very widely, both non-fiction and fiction, so I don't think there's a single writer who influences me.

When I was a young writer if you went to a party and told somebody you were a science-fiction writer you would be insulted. They would call you Flash Gordon all evening, or Buck Rogers.

One of the advantages of having gone to Penn State was having had a scholar for a mentor - Philip Young. Also, a professional writer named Philip Klass taught there. He was a science fiction writer whose pseudonym was William Tenn. As a professional writer, he brought wisdom to teaching because he'd done it for a living.

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.

A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it's not as satisfying in the end.

Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.

If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.

As a fiction writer you train yourself to think about situations subjectively. I don't really care for narratives that are just A, B, C, D, and then E. I like the aura that fiction has, how it can conjure up dream imagery. It's a sort of emotional speculation that you can shape and work with.

The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.

That is as true for fiction or non-fiction. The writer has to really know their subject. It is really important to remember that the readers are a lot smarter than the writer. Also, good writing has to do with rewriting. You will never get it right the first time. So you rewrite and rewrite again until you get it right. Until you, and the reader, will be able to visualize what you're writing about.

I've read science fiction my whole life. I never really dreamed that I'd be a published science fiction writer myself, but a short story I started years ago sort of demanded to be turned into a novel.

I'm a fiction writer, and I do write essays, but I am not a poet. And I absolutely reject the phrase 'woman writer' as anti-feminist. I wrote an essay about this as far back as 1977, at the height of the neo-feminist movement.

When a writer is already stretching the bounds of reality by writing within a science fiction or fantasy setting, that writer must realize that excessive coincidence makes the fictional reality the writer is creating less 'real.'

I'm not a science-fiction writer. I've only written one book that's science fiction, and that's Fahrenheit 451. All the others are fantasy.

When I think about myself as a writer, for sure I am a science fiction writer. The tools of extrapolation, the tools of anticipating the future - those are science fictional questions.

There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it's well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world.

I don't believe a poet has a better hold on truth or morality than a fiction writer has. And I don't think a fiction writer has anything over a journalist. It's all about the good word, properly inserted.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

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.

Comedy is like fictional charm. It's the charm of fiction. Or the charisma of fiction. When you meet somebody who's immediately charismatic, you're attracted to that person. And in fiction it's got to come out in either one of two ways: in the prose itself, and you're hooked immediately because you never want to leave such a colorful and penetrating world. Or, it's simply being a funny writer.

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

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.

When I first began to write fiction, I didn't think I was a comic writer; I thought I was a serious writer. I was surprised when the first novel I wrote was regarded as a funny novel.

I like to think of myself as a fiction writer who liked art enough to write about it for a while, and then went on to his fiction.

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.

I am not a pure fiction writer, nor am I an academic writer. Somehow I ended up in this blended area of literary journalism.

Fiction and screenwriting blend for me. I feel like being a TV writer/screenwriter has definitely made my fiction writing better, although I have less time to do it.

As every writer knows... there is something mysterious about the writer's ability, on any given day, to write. When the juices are flowing, or the writer is 'hot', an invisible wall seems to fall away, and the writer moves easily and surely from one kind of reality to another... Every writer has experienced at least moments of this strange, magical state. Reading student fiction one can spot at once where the power turns on and where it turns off, where the writer writes from 'inspiration' or deep, flowing vision, and where he had to struggle along on mere intellect.

I've always wanted to write science fiction. It was one of my first loves, and I knew if I became a writer someday I'd probably write something in the science fiction vein, but I hesitated for a long while because it's such well-trod ground.

Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort is to remove that distinction. The writer is the midwife of understanding. It's very important for me to tell politics like a story, to make it real.

Science fiction is where I started out, really. When I was a kid, I was a complete addict of science fiction. It was one of my earliest interests as a writer, and I've just taken a long time to circle back around to it.

The strange dilemma of the 'ethnic-fiction' writer is that you are supposed to carry a banner for your homeland, be a voice for it, and educate the rest of the world about it, but I think that's far too onerous a burden for any writer to bear.

Fiction always reveals a lot about the person who is writing it. That's the scary thing. Not in a straightforward autobiographical sense. But the flaws in a piece of fiction are, unhappily, so often also the flaws of the writer.

The writer is often faced with two choices--turn away from the reality of life's intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.

In my opinion there are two basic questions that any writer tries to answer. "What is?" is the question non-fiction asks. "What if?" is the question fiction asks. That's the question I'm more interested in.

There must be a dozen films now based on Philip K. Dick novels or stories, far more than any other published science fiction writer. He's sort of become the go-to guy for weird science fiction notions.

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.

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.

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.

I don't think I've ever really been a science fiction writer. I'm closer to a fantasist, speculative fiction, whatever, but labels are ultimately derogatory, and I eschew them as best I can.

It wasn't a decision to become a writer. I wanted to become a writer of crime fiction. I was very specific.

A short story is a writer's way of thinking through experience... Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction's aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth.

I remember reading an interview with a writer who said that in nonfiction if you have one lie it sort of messes it up. But in fiction the real details give you so much more credibility, because people do so much research just to write fiction. In fiction you're trying to recreate something lifelike.

I dislike that premise implies that a fiction writer is incapable of dreaming up stories that can bring readers to tears, that if you are lucky enough to be living a pretty sedate life ,as I am, you've got nothing worthy of writing about, that you're incapable of making a reader's gut wrench.Frankly, that's what makes readers nervous, the sorcery of you or me or any good fiction writer making up characters who feel like real people, of telling a story that feels true but isn't.

I am not a science fiction writer. I am a fantasy writer. But the label got put on me and stuck.

I never wanted to be "a writer"; I only ever aspired to be an science fiction writer. They'll tear that badge out of my cold dead hands.

If you want to be a fiction writer, you need to start reading like a fiction writer. To do so, you need to learn about craft so that the next time you pick up a contemporary short story, you're reading it not as an abstraction floating in formaldehyde, existing simply for the theorist's dull scalpel to saw on, but as a concrete thing constructed out of words and shaped by syntax, brought to life by a writer who made several thousand choices, some large, some small, before letting that imperfect beauty, the story, walk on its own two feet.

I'm a fiction writer, and fiction is telling the lives of unreal people. But the only way you can learn to do that well is by really understanding the lives of real people.

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.

Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all.

I don't think I'm more of a screenwriter than I am a fiction writer. I'm more of a reader than a film-watcher, so I imagine that I'm not approaching fiction or films in a particularly cinematic way.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I'm 100 percent fiction writer... I don't want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don't state my political messages to anybody.

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.