Top 1200 Fiction Writing Quotes & Sayings - Page 5

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

I like rules. I like definitions, categories, and writing advice of all sorts. When I'm writing fiction, there are often a lot of things for me to try to get right at once, and rules help me to stay organized. But my favorite rule of all is that, ultimately, there are no rules.

Some of the best fiction writers got their start writing airline menus.

I love writing fiction - you can take just what you want from a place, and leave the rest.

Outlining is not writing. Coming up with ideas is not writing. Researching is not writing. Creating characters is not writing. Only writing is writing.

In non-fiction, I found John Gardner's two writing books to be tremendously helpful.

I'd rather let the fiction speak for itself and I don't want to write fiction that tells people how to feel, and I don't want to be judgmental in the fiction.

I think one of the paradoxes of writing fiction is when people enjoy it, they want it to be real. So they look for connections.

Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out.

I was an avid reader, but never thought seriously about writing a novel until I was in my thirties. I took no formal fiction-writing courses and never thought about these categories when I wrote my first novel.

What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.

The traditional route to success in science fiction is by making a name for yourself in short fiction, so people who read science fiction magazines will recognize your byline on a novel.

I love writing fiction and can do it anywhere - I once even missed a flight because I was so engrossed.

The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.

It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

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.

It's the feeling of being lifted out of my life into another world that is the thrill of writing fiction.

I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

That's what I like most about writing fiction over journalism: the easy metaphors!

I'm a novelist. I'm not a crusader, and I'm not an editorial writer. And I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.

My work is very eclectic. I write books that range from writing fiction, writing fable where I am very directly trying to imagine alternate worlds, to writing about [Buckminster] Fuller who was the ultimate world man creating all sorts of alternate worlds and believing that they were imminent to my own work of - for instance, a project that I've been working on for some year and a half, two years now that continues to evolve has been what I call Deep Time Photography.

So much history, if you or I were to write it, could seem a fiction. These separations, these lines that tell us this is fiction or non-fiction, that this is history or this is a novel, are often useless.

I think fiction can help us find everything. You know, I think that in fiction you can say things and in a way be truer than you can be in real life and truer than you can be in non-fiction. There's an accuracy to fiction that people don't really talk about - an emotional accuracy.

I'm not disciplined in terms of scheduling. I work best late at night, but I can't do that when I'm on a TV show - our hours are roughly 10-6:30, so I have to go to sleep at a reasonable hour. So I'll sometimes write fiction for an hour or two in the evenings, or several hours on the weekend afternoons - unless I'm actively writing a script for the show I'm working on, in which case there's no time to write fiction at all.

writing fiction is the best thing there is because absolutely everything is possible!

I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.

For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent.

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.

We're completely confused about the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. To me, the moment you compose, you're fictionalising; the moment you remember, you're dreaming. It's ludicrous that we have to pretend that non-fiction has to be real in some absolute sense.

Writing and reading fiction is, I think, a human effort to make sense of the world.

I began writing fiction when I started running out of material in my own life.

Fiction ought to announce the problems, dramatize the problems, display them. Yet offer no set answer. An answer would solve the mystery. Writing fiction, for me, is about putting on paper my obsessive interest in something mysterious. I may figure out the source of the mystery, the things that brought some action or image to my mind, but to make an equation of it would ruin the story.

My first and biggest love was always fiction writing. But it is a very lonely pastime.

I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.

While writing a novel, I don't read anything new in fiction. I am too engrossed.

I think what happens is you write how you grew up. And I was born on the prairie, and so everything is kind of spare on the prairie. And so I'm just used to writing in that way. 'Sarah, Plain and Tall' was that way. And most of my fiction is. I like writing small pieces. Somehow it just suits me.

When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.

The one thing they didn't tell you at Iowa is how hard it is to make a living writing fiction and poetry.

Science fiction is a weird category, because it's the only area of fiction I can think of where the story is not of primary importance. Science fiction tends to be more about the science, or the invention of the fantasy world, or the political allegory. When I left science fiction, I said "They're more interested in planets, and I'm interested in people."

They say truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, but there's such a thing as believability when you're writing a novel.

At times of crisis or distress, it's poems that people turn to. (Poetry) still has a power to speak to people's feelings, maybe in a way that fiction, because it works in a longer way, can't. There's a little bit of your brain that mourns and grieves that you're not writing poetry, but actually as long as I'm writing something, I'm happy.

I originally went to school for writing, for non-fiction. I'm specifically a poetry major within literature, but I don't know.

They [academy writing programs] have no concept that the world has changed, that publishing has changed, that filmmaking has changed, and if you're not constantly looking at your education model and adjusting for the change, you'll find yourself teaching antiquity. Like all of these programs that won't accept students who are writing genre fiction - what an institutional ego!

You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing- your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.

Writing fiction is a resolutely solitary pastime, and I love being with people, so the public side of being an author is, to me, the reward for all the private time invested. And I love teaching to a fault; I have a hard time not giving away a lot of my own writing energy to my students.

Never believe that the fiction writing life makes sense.... It's insanity by definition.

Fiction writing and journalism, in my experience, are really excellent training grounds for each other.

After writing several chapter books, I found my true passion: historical fiction.

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

Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.

When I was writing stories about Chinese American characters in my fiction classes, I'd get comments like, 'You should consider writing more universal stories.' But anything can happen to a Chinese American girl - just as much of the canon of English literature involves white men or women.

I had been writing fiction since I was in eighth grade, because I loved it.

Writing is very castrating in the moment. Fiction in general, it has no function, nobody asks for it.

Expressing political opinion can be a powerful way to establish a character's voice when writing fiction.

Fiction writing is just an excuse to go discover interesting things.

For about as long as I've been writing fiction, I've kept a record of the books I've read.

It's very strange writing science fiction in a world that moves as fast as ours does.

My greatest qualification for writing fiction was my ability to lie with a straight face as a child.

The triumph of writing fiction is that by doing so, writers can build a more ideal world in themselves.