Fiction Writers Quotes

#1. Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.

Rudy Rucker

#2. The novelist's obligation to remake the sensuous texture of a vanished world is also the historian's. The strongest fiction writers often do deep research to make the thought and utterances of lost time credible.

Simon Schama

#3. Historians turning their hands to fiction are all the rage. Since Alison Weir led the way in 2006, an ever-growing number of established non-fiction writers - Giles Milton, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Harry Sidebottom, Patrick Bishop, Ian Mortimer and myself included - have written historical novels.

Saul David

#4. I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character.

Hanya Yanagihara

#5. I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers.

Francine Prose

#6. Love was for dummies, soulmates were the creation of pulp-fiction writers; romance was craved by ageing, lonely cat owners. Successful relationships were built on rationality and compromise.

Karan Bajaj

#7. I think fiction writers should work. If you have a job and are not living off advances or grants, you never have to make concessions in your writing, ever.

Hanya Yanagihara

#8. The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured - we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more.

Sara Sheridan

#9. Fiction writers, magicians, politicians and priests are the only people rewarded for entertaining us with their lies

Bangambiki Habyarimana

#10. As fiction writers, we are entertainers.

Bob Mayer

#11. Memoirists, unlike fiction writers, do not really want to 'tell a story.' They want to tell it all - the all of personal experience, of consciousness itself. That includes a story, but also the whole expanding universe of sensation and thought ... Memoirists wish to tell their mind. Not their story.

Patricia Hampl

#12. I can't recommend technical writing as a day job for fiction writers because it's going to be hard to write all day and then come home and write fiction.

Ted Chiang

#13. That's the thing about fiction writers: what seems alarming or particular or perverse about them is simply the shape of their brain - they cannot be otherwise.

Zadie Smith

#14. 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

#15. I was joking earlier when I said that all writers are manic depressives, but it's a joke with a lot of truth behind it. For fiction writers and poets, too, there's something wrong with you and you do this art as a way of correcting it or addressing it in some way.

T.C. Boyle

#16. The term sci-fi, which most science fiction writers loathe, I will reserve for those motion pictures that claim to be science fiction but are actually based on comic strips. Or worse.

Ben Bova

#17. I was looking at a lot of experimental writers, and I was very intrigued by short-short fiction, writers who would write little things, what I call buttons now, little vignettes.

Sandra Cisneros

#18. Science fiction writers missed the most salient feature of our modern era: the Internet.

Jack McDevitt

#19. Role playing is the definition of fiction writers

M Theresa Tseng

#20. Eliot admitted later on that science-fiction writers couldn't write for sour apples, but he declared that it didn't matter. He said they were poets just the same, since they were more sensitive to important changes than anybody who was writing well.

Kurt Vonnegut

#21. If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.

Bruce Sterling

#22. I think a colony in space will take much longer than sci fiction writers think. It costs $10,000 to put a pound of anything into near earth orbit. That is your weight in gold. It costs about $100,000 a pound to put you on the moon. And it costs $1,000,000 a pound to put you on Mars.

Michio Kaku

#23. In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.

Lauren Groff

#24. Like most science-fiction writers, he knew almost nothing about science.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

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

Alan Cheuse

#26. Stories are not explanations of the world we live in. Science does that, and math does that. Our obligation as fiction writers is to enhance the mysteries.

Tim O'Brien

#27. Like most science-fiction writers, Trout knew almost nothing about science, was bored stiff by technical details.

Kurt Vonnegut

#28. I love science fiction. I always have, ever since I was a kid. I love a lot of science fiction writers. William Gibson is one of my favorite writers.

Tahmoh Penikett

#29. Maybe the search for life shouldn't restrict attention to planets like Earth. Science fiction writers have other ideas: balloon-like creatures floating in the dense atmospheres of planets such as Jupiter, swarms of intelligent insects, nano-scale robots and more.

Martin Rees

#30. Fiction writers learn about the development of metaphor, the use of rhythm, the way that language is compacted in order to express the feelings of - express their own feelings and the feelings of their characters.

Edward Hirsch

#31. When you say that you write romantic fiction, there are a lot of people who have an image in their mind of the 'bodice ripper.' It's the one term that most romantic fiction writers absolutely hate because it has no bearing on what people are writing.

Susanna Kearsley

#32. We fiction writers are a brazen lot, are we not? For we, in our passion, embrace just enough truth to consecrate our delicately contrived lies.

Val Edward Simone

#33. I'm the only member of SFWA in Nebraska, but I don't pine away for the companionship of other science fiction writers. I [go] to very few conventions. I'm quite willing to be that eccentric who has a very odd job, quite happy to be the only science fiction writer in town.

Robert Reed

#34. Bradbury would have said his plots are myths and metaphors that tell stories about the human condition. That's what sets him apart from other science-fiction writers: He doesn't write about technology, but about the human heart and psyche.

Sam Weller

#35. Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.

David Foster Wallace

#36. My father taught me to love detective fiction writers such as Raymond Chandler. When I decided to have a hard-boiled detective series I did a lot of studying before I wrote the first book. I learned police procedure, the California criminal law, and many areas outside my expertise.

Sue Grafton

#37. There's a perilous word fiction writers need to watch out for. The word is 'had.'

James Scott Bell

#38. 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

#39. Here's a quick rule of thumb: Don't annoy science fiction writers. These are people who destroy entire planets before lunch. Think of what they'll do to you.

John Scalzi

#40. Here are the top three global resources getting scarcer in the twenty-first century: ozone layer, rain forest, people eager to read the fiction of others. That's right, folks. For the first time in I believe written history, there are far more fiction writers on earth than fiction readers.

Sandra Tsing Loh

#41. I think the deepest thing is that many fiction writers tell stories but are not elegant writers. But, we're not writing journalism when we're making literature.

Edward Hirsch

#42. I do not know who first invented the myth of sexual equality. But it is a myth willfully fostered and nourished by certain semi-scientists and other fiction writers. And it has done more, I suspect, to unsettle marital happiness than any other false doctrine of this myth-ridden age.

Phyllis McGinley

#43. If asked to list my ten favorite American fiction writers, Gail Godwin would be among them. In this, her latest ... she evokes in a short book the long married life of two artists. Evenings at Five is a strong tale of love-after-death.

Ned Rorem

#44. Two excellent crime fiction writers I'm currently reading...

Laura Wilson and Andrew Taylor

Roger Boutwell

#45. Delaying and withholding tactics, red herrings, partial and doubtful outcomes are stock in trade for fiction writers, especially crime writers.

Garry Disher

#46. Not all fiction writers are evil, just the ones good at their job. After all, it's not a decent book if it can't make you cry.

Ellie Rose McKee

#47. I've always felt that no one understands why some books of non-fiction endure and some don't, because there's not much understanding among many non-fiction writers that the narrative is terribly important.

Robert Caro

#48. I go to readings by fiction writers like Alice Walker, and I'm envious of the level of attention they generate.

Derrick Bell

#49. Science fiction writers didn't predict the fade-out of NASA's manned space operations, and they weren't prepared with alternative routes to space when that decline became undeniable.

Gregory Benford

#50. Well you can't believe everything you read. After all, by definition, fiction writers lie for a living.

Janette Rallison

#51. New fiction writers are a special breed in my estimation, and I never dreamed that so many people would be interested, but I remember being led by God.

Tim LaHaye

#52. Despite what your science fiction writers dream, we simply don't have the technology

Stephenie Meyer

#53. That's what fiction writers do: create characters and do terrible things to them for the entertainment of others. If they feel guilty enough, they write happy endings.

Garry Trudeau

#54. I'm in love. And I like how that feels. And I hate how that feels. Because love is an invention of fiction writers.

Ellen Hopkins

#55. Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

Philip K. Dick

#56. Science fiction writers aren't fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes.

William Gibson

#57. It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational - and I'm speaking the written science fiction, not 'Star Trek.' Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they're clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.

Terry Pratchett

#58. When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program, we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing, and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry.

Edward Hirsch

#59. I started in this racket in the early '70s, and when I was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, of which I was like the sixth president, I was the first one nobody ever heard of.

Jerry Pournelle

#60. Women don't want to exchange places with men. Male chauvinists, science-fiction writers and comedians may favor that idea for its shock value, but psychologists say it is a fantasy based on ruling-class ego and guilt.

Gloria Steinem

#61. Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

Isaac Asimov

#62. It is important not to force a character into something. Fiction writers can be too controlling - usually that's a terror of our own unconscious processes.

Jeanette Winterson

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

Stephen King

#64. The only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers.

Sheri S. Tepper

#65. We're trying to make something that lasts in language and there's no question that many fiction writers began as poets and it's hard for me to think of any good fiction writers who don't also read poetry.

Edward Hirsch

#66. However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.

Wally Lamb

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

Erma Bombeck

#68. I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don't. When I first started writing, I just started writing a novel. It's a hard way to learn to write. I don't recommend it to my students, but it just happens that way for some of us.

Andrea Barrett

#69. Fiction writers shouldn't take themselves too seriously - we're just daydreamers who daydream better than most.

Flavia Ida

#70. We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that.

Kevin J. Anderson

#71. There are no such things as happy endings. Never. They're totally manufactured by fiction writers who choose to end the story on a high point.

Peter David

#72. The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.

Vernor Vinge

#73. I think songwriters are more related to fiction writers. The Odyssey was a story in song. To me, that's so beautiful, all those painted characters, all those travels and adventures.

Regina Spektor

#74. I can list on one hand the famous science fiction writers I never met.

Robert Silverberg

#75. Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

Alice McDermott

#76. When fiction writers like my poems I feel like I've hit the jackpot.

Cate Marvin

#77. People have always heard voices. Sometimes they're called shamans, sometimes they're called mad, and sometimes they're called fiction writers. I always feel lucky that I live in a culture where fiction writing is legal and not seen as pathology.

Ruth Ozeki

#78. Many fiction writers who put the science in don't get it right.

Kathy Reichs

#79. It seems like every few years a big name author will holler something about how evil, heinous, and morally wrong fan fiction and fan fiction writers are, and then the Internet gets all upset and shocked, and then the author is shocked that people could get so upset.

Catherynne M Valente

#80. Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.

Peter Straub

#81. Fiction writers can't be trusted. They make things up.

Dan Poynter

#82. You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.

Lorrie Moore

#83. Futurism today is led by science-fiction writers, by sociologists, by historians. Now, I have nothing against them. I'm sure they do great work. But they're not scientists. They're clueless.

Michio Kaku

#84. Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don't think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously.

Isabel Allende

#85. My writing process is ritualized and monotonous, but there's no other way to get the job done. All other fiction writers I've met say the same thing.

Douglas Coupland

#86. Technology has now enabled a type of ubiquitous surveillance that had previously been the province of only the most imaginative science fiction writers.

Glenn Greenwald

#87. I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere.

Sharon Olds

#88. Human anatomy is horribly unsuited for outer space. The astroengineers lost sleep over this but not the science fiction writers, who being artists simply didn't mention it.

Stanislaw Lem

#89. Where are they, the American fiction writers whose works are interested in the question "What do these people have to do with us?" and "What are we doing out there in the world?

Kamila Shamsie

#90. A writer's obligation is to invent: to go beyond what did happen and to look at what could have happened but didn't. Fiction writers are born liars.

Tim O'Brien

#91. Fiction writers are strange beasts. They are, like all writers, observers first and foremost. Everything that happens to and around them is potential material for a story, and they look at it that way.

Terry Brooks

#92. I actually very rarely see comedy myself, and although I admire the work of some comics, it does come from all over, so I'll get a charge out of some fiction writers and poets.

Dylan Moran

#93. Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition. I'm not entirely at ease with that self-description.

Charles Stross

#94. I believe fiction writers are the most honest of liars. They expose their innermost thoughts through deception.

Nicholas Adams

#95. I wonder if it's in the nature of fiction writers to never quite see their own lives as 'real,' since we are always making stuff up!

Julia Glass

#96. Much to my surprise, there's a sense for people in the cable industry that fiction writers might actually be good at script writing. You can write dialogue!

Matthew Specktor

#97. Historical facts are the vital framework around which non-fiction writers construct their narratives; they are, quite simply, indispensable.

Saul David

#98. Science fiction writers have usually been very poor prognosticators of the future, either in literary or technological terms, and that's because we're all too human and, I think, have the tendency to see what we want to or, in the case of those more paranoid, what we fear.

L.E. Modesitt Jr.

#99. I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.

Alain De Botton

#100. There are vast differences between scripts and stories, of course. Few fiction writers would want to give up the opportunity to explore how the minds of their characters work, or to set aside the opportunity to provide necessary background exposition in a succinct fashion.

Les Standiford