Best Fiction Writers Quotes

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

Erma Bombeck

#2. I've always loved what I'd term 'dark fiction' writers, everyone from J. G. Ballard to Mervyn Peake and Philip Pullman. I'm not sure it's a genre, but it's what I like best.

Christopher Fowler

#3. Maybe I have a one-track mind, but the best writers and thinkers are focusing on nonfiction these days; this is the genre where a writer can make a mark and change an aspect of the world - much more so than in fiction.

Lee Gutkind

#4. A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

Raymond Carver

#5. Many Scandinavian writers who had made their name in literary fiction felt they wanted to have a go at the crime novel to show they could compete with the best. If Salman Rushdie had been Norwegian, he would definitely have written at least one thriller.

Jo Nesbo

#6. Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.

Nell Freudenberger

#7. Best seller material, and she didn't have to write a single word.

A.L. Mabry

#8. Biographies are best when written chronologically. Boring people don't make for good biographies.

Deana J. Driver

#9. Some people become passionate readers and fans of science fiction during childhood or adolescence. I picked up on SF somewhat later than that; my escape reading of choice during my youth was historical novels, and one of my favorite writers was Mary Renault.

Pamela Sargent

#10. Writing a book with completely fictitious characters is like running a democracy, centered around a capital state. You constantly live with the fear & suspicion that one of the characters will start an uncontrollable rebellion.

Shomprakash Sinha Roy

#11. Putting a piece of you in your protagonist adds depth and merges the worlds of fiction and reality.

Adam Steven Page

#12. Writers of novels live in a strange world where what's made up is as important as what's real.

Sara Sheridan

#13. I think fiction writers write what they do because no one else has written it and they want to read it.

Alan Cheuse

#14. The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them.

Flannery O'Connor

#15. It was as if his fingers knew things, but they couldn't show him unless they were moving, touching. He had to think it was similar for carpenters and writers, and he knew it was the same for chefs.

Laura Lippman

#16. We [fiction writers] are much more of a maze than we are a motorway. Things are always in flux, they're always in movement, they're always twisting back on each other. I think the straight line is such a lie.

Jeanette Winterson

#17. It's always difficult when people compare me unfavorably with other contemporary writers. It's much easier when they use examples from earlier eras of fiction. Because then I can say, Well, I may not be talented, but at least I'm not DEAD.

Tad Williams

#18. Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.

Barry Unsworth

#19. Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.

Linwood Barclay