Top 1200 Fiction Writing Quotes & Sayings - Page 6

I began writing fiction because it was the only way to tell all the intricacies of a real-life spy story.

I spend most of my time reading non-fiction of all sorts. Then poetry. Then fiction to blurb. Then fiction I want to read.

The art of writing fiction is to sail as dangerously close to the truth as possible without sinking the ship

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

Sometimes when we label something dystopian fiction, I feel like we're trying very hard not to use the words 'science fiction,' because science fiction has those horrible connotations of rocket ships and bodacious babes.

I prefer non-fiction to fiction. In fact, I don't read fiction at all. I read books that are based on true events.

Topiary has always seemed like a good occupation, comparable in some ways to writing short fiction.

I find myself, by happy accident, writing 'Young Adult' fiction. However, I dislike such categories.

My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.

Fantasy is fantasy. It's fiction. It's not meant to be a textbook. I don't believe in letting research overwhelm the fiction. That's a danger of science fiction in particular, as opposed to fantasy. A lot of writers forget that what they're doing is supposed to be art.

My job, in general, is nonfiction, so writing fiction was liberating. If you can't find the answer to something, you just make it up!

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.

I don't separate writing songs from poetry and short fiction. In the area where I work in my house, there's a word processor and a guitar.

It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.

I often tell people who want to write historical fiction: don't read all that much about the period you're writing about; read things from the period that you're writing about. There's a tendency to stoke up on a lot of biography and a lot of history, and not to actually get back to the original sources.

Most of what I do is science fiction. Some of the things I do are fantasy. I don't like the labels, they're marketing tools, and I certainly don't worry about them when I'm writing. They are also inhibiting factors; you wind up not getting read by certain people, or not getting sold to certain people because they think they know what you write. You say science fiction and everybody thinks Star Wars or Star Trek.

I'm writing books. They're still a mix of fact and fiction and will continue to be. I think it's an interesting place to work.

I don't think the function of writing, at least for me as a fiction writer, is to say to people, "Here's the answer." It's not an op-ed.

To me, stretching the capabilities of my imagination is a crucial aspect of writing fiction; you could think of it as a mental form of athleticism.

I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford.

I think I made my first short fiction sale in 2005. I had been writing unsuccessfully before that.

Why couldn't the world that concerns us- be a fiction? And if somebody asked, 'but to be a fiction there surely belongs an author?'- couldn't one answer simply: 'Why? Doesn't this "belongs" perhaps belong to the fiction, too?'

I have to have music as a soundtrack to writing fiction. I listen to it at other times, too, but it helps me write.

For me, there is urgency in fiction, even though writing is, in itself, an act against the corrosiveness of time.

I wrote 'Knots and Crosses,' the first of the Rebus books, not even realising that I was writing crime fiction.

Writing fiction lets you be a little more emotional and unguarded, a little freer. Writing fictional characters is also really different from writing about real people. In nonfiction, you can only say so much about the people you interact with. After all, they're actual people, their version of their story trumps yours. In a novel, you can build a character, using certain parts or impressions of someone you know, and guessing or inventing others, without having to worry that your guesses or memories or inventions are wrong.

I sometimes get asked if I think about film stuff while I'm writing fiction, and the answer is, of course not.

What I find interesting and heartening, though, is that there does seem to be a shift in the subject matter being written about by women that is doing well in the culture. We're seeing more women writing dystopian fiction, more women writing novels set post-apocalyptic settings, subjects and themes that used to be dominated by men.

It's kind of alarming for me to realize that, when I'm writing stories about times I remember, it's already historical fiction.

I was an outsider, never quite part of what was going on, always looking in. It turned out to be great preparation for writing fiction.

I came to fantasy fairly late. For some ten years, I had been happily writing fiction and non-fiction for adults. But I always loved fantasy, whether for adults or young people; and at that particular point in my life, I wanted to try it, to understand it, as part of the process of learning to be a writer. The results were beyond anything I could have foreseen. As I've said often and elsewhere, it was the most creative and liberating experience of my life.

While I love to read contemporary fiction, I'm not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it's because the former journalist in me is too inhibited by the press of reality; when I think about writing of my own time I always think about nonfiction narratives. Or perhaps it's just that I find the present too confounding.

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.

When you start writing fiction, you have to learn to invent, and it's very hard at the beginning to stop relying on facts and what you've heard.

It's interesting how many science fiction writers get going when they are very young. I was on a program with Greg Bear and he mentioned that he had gotten started writing when he was eight. And I began writing when I was 10. I think we're influenced by the stuff, we find it and we love it and we're influenced by it....I know I collected my first rejection slip when I was 13, and I went on collecting them for a long time after that.

I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.

I love writing romance, along with science fiction and fantasy - and my books usually meld all three to some degree.

Fiction is often most powerful when the author is exploring an issue - and not writing like a know-it-all who has the perfect answer.

I've loved science fiction my whole life. But I've never made a science fiction movie. And it's [World Of Tomorrow] sort of a parody of science fiction at the same time. It's all of the things I find interesting in sci-fi amplified.

Even when it comes to writing fiction, how do you encompass all this stuff that's right on the tip of your tongue? You have to fold that into what you're working on.

My writing has always been what you call 'narrative fiction' in the sense that it's got very strong plots and twists at the end.

I think of myself as writing realist American fiction. 'Cynical but hopeful' wouldn't be the worst thing I've ever been called.

I was writing fiction steadily, but I found that the stark determinisms of code were a welcome relief from the ambiguities of literary narrative.

Writers of fiction should stick to writing, not pop up on panel shows or as a talking head.

I teach a non-fiction writing class at New York University, and one of my great pleasures is deciding on the syllabus.

Writing is such a solitary thing, so its nice, when Im discouraged, to see people still have such faith in fiction.

Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language.

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building.

The writing you allude to is a form of dissent, but it's also expressive of the need to evolve beyond what is turgid and stale in contemporary fiction.

One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.

Writing fiction is an act of imagination and fantasizing, and it's not relating in prose what you've been doing for the last two or three years.

Writing fiction is an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.

Writing fiction is... an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.

Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.

For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.

Prose gets divided up into fiction and nonfiction and short fiction and long fiction and autobiographical nonfiction and so on. Poetry can do any of those things except with the added definition of intensified formal pressure.

It's a scary thing for fiction writers, when you're always writing from the point of view both as and for someone who is different.

Writing fiction means putting a lot of what you believe about the world at risk, because you have to follow your characters.

Writing objects to the lie that life is small. Writing is a cell of energy. Writing defines itself. Writing draws its viewer in for longer than an instant. Writing exhibits boldness. Writing restores power to exalt, unnerve, shock, and transform us. Writing does not imitate life, it anticipates life.

As you see, I bear some resentment and some scars from the years of anti-genre bigotry. My own fiction, which moves freely around among realism, magical realism, science fiction, fantasy of various kinds, historical fiction, young adult fiction, parable, and other subgenres, to the point where much of it is ungenrifiable, all got shoved into the Sci Fi wastebasket or labeled as kiddilit - subliterature.