Top 100 On Writing Fiction Quotes
#1. I've devoted a lot of my time and effort during the past few years to developing my advertising copywriting business to the point of where I can support my family and don't have to depend on writing fiction for my income.
George Stephen
#2. I like writing for movies. It's nice to be alone working on fiction in your room, and then it's nice to be in a room with a bunch of people working on a movie.
Daniel Handler
#3. 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.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#4. Most people assume I write at night because of the kind of books I write, but I can shut out the light with my mind.
Carla H. Krueger
#5. When I first started writing, I did mostly short fiction, and I'd work on a short story and get near to being done and have no idea what I'd work on next, and then I'd panic.
Ann Leckie
#6. To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.
Aldous Huxley
#7. I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing.
Megan Abbott
#8. I would write light entertainment nonfiction pieces during the day, then come home and work on my fantasy fiction. It was very difficult to get out of the one mindset and into another one.
Cassandra Clare
#9. On the other hand, now that I'm not dependent on fiction for my income, I've been writing more short stories despite the fact that there's no real paying market for short horror other than Cemetery Dance.
George Stephen
#10. you come to understand that history might be, as Thomas Carlyle put it, "a distillation of rumor," or, as Napoleon said, "a set of lies generally agreed upon
James Alexander Thom
#11. I write fiction. It may have mystery, it may have horror, it may have fantasy, it may have love, but like life, it's all the same genre.
Don Roff
#12. I love storytelling when the writing spins through me like photons on their way to lighting the world.
Kay Kenyon
#13. I consider whoever my words land on to be my target, that's why I like flash fiction, it's a lot like using a shotgun.
Neil Leckman
#14. In New York and L.A., there is sort of that silent competition to be on the cutting edge of something. You end up having a conversation with how the world receives your work, especially if you are writing narrative, not fiction. Sometimes it is an awkward conversation. It's like group therapy.
Sloane Crosley
#15. One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
Michael Cunningham
#16. You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.
Joss Whedon
#17. 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
#18. Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.
Anne Enright
#19. Writing is an act of faith. One must believe and see people who are invisible to others and be faithful to tell half formed stories. It's like being on the trail of an apparition who's repeatedly just out of reach.
K. Youngblood
Katherine Imogene Youngblood
#20. You need to take some acting classes to learn to hide your huge crush on my husband better
Mary Papas
#21. I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.
Andre Dubus
#22. Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was "a way out of loneliness."
(NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)
Jonathan Franzen
#23. different genres. To go with her fiction, she also writes nonfiction in many different fields with books available on resume writing, companion gardening
Dale Mayer
#24. The other one was filled with loud and obnoxious tourists. Always boasting on winning a sand castle competition and seeing who could get tanned first. What a whacky bunch of people.
Erica Sehyun Song
#25. Writing fiction or nonfiction is a lonely battle wrestling with sentences in an effort to put together an intelligible thought that speaks for the author.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#26. Stephen King, by far, is the standard-bearer. I think anyone who writes suspense fiction and says that King isn't an influence is either lying or being foolish. I read his book 'On Writing' before I read pretty much any of his fiction.
Michael Koryta
#27. The letter of application ... should be a masterpiece of fiction, papering over all the cracks. Get it properly typed on decent writing paper. Never let it run over the page, people get bored with reading.
Jilly Cooper
#28. If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.
Salman Rushdie
#29. The real Julian Wells didn't die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track.
Bret Easton Ellis
#30. When I was a kid, I figured I would be a physicist when I grew up, and then I would write science fiction on the side. The physicist thing didn't pan out, but writing science fiction on the side did.
Ted Chiang
#31. I first tried a novel when I was 14. First finished one when I was 16. First started working on stuff that had a chance of being salable in my early 20s, then didn't write much fiction at all because I was in grad school.
Harry Turtledove
#32. Fiction should be in its way subversive. I don't think books should be neat or gentle or genteel or comforting. I think they should be raw. They should be written as perfectly as possible, but what they do is to stir up, to lance the reader.
Edna O'Brien
#33. There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.
Flannery O'Connor
#34. To write a novel is to dream while awake, then express the dream to the reader in an absorbing way. The road leading from the writer's inner world to the readers' is paved with prose.
Alan Joshua
#35. Writing is cathartic when you write to please yourself not others.
C.C. Wyatt
#36. 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. That doesn't mean my books are autobiographical.
Janet Fitch
#37. 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
#38. If you love somebody then tell them how you feel dont be scared of their reaction or rejection life is too short. you should take a chance and if things dont work out as you plan dont worry cuz life moves on and true love will be waiting for you again.
Atul Purohit
#39. The worst part of writing fiction is the fear of wasting your life behind a keyboard. The idea that, dying, you'll realize you only lived on paper. Your only adventures were make-believe, and while the world fought and kissed, you sat in some dark room masturbating and making money.
Chuck Palahniuk
#40. Write for joy. It is the *only* reason to write. Whatever happens to your books afterward, just write for joy. Send your current one out when it's done and forget it, start another, and keep on writing for joy. Words I now live by. Welwyn Wilton Katz
Welwyn Wilton Katz
#41. On 'Stranger Than Fiction,' the script was so good that I stuck to every line because it was just such brilliant writing from Zach Helm that I felt like I really just want to shoot the page.
Marc Forster
#43. I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.
Wilkie Collins
#44. Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.
Khaled Hosseini
#45. As a writer who writes poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, I think it's important to always maintain a firm grasp on genre and ethics.
Kathleen Rooney
#46. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.
Neil Gaiman
#47. Writers of fiction should stick to writing, not pop up on panel shows or as a talking head.
Robert Harris
#48. On the blank page all things are possible.
Marty Rubin
#49. 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.
Tom Robbins
#50. A moment later the scowling face of Admiral Jellico appeared on the screen. He looked as ill-humored as ever. Privately, Calhoun felt that somebody should send an away team into Jellico's ass, to determine just what had crawled up there and died years ago.
Peter David
#51. She said that her job as a writer of fiction was to report on the human condition, to tel us who we are and what we think and what we do.
Elizabeth Strout
#52. Most of my writer friends are women, and they're all extremely talented, so of course I think the state of contemporary fiction for women is pretty great. Which is to say there is a ton of amazing work out there. These women are writing hard. There's much to be said. We're on it, chief.
Jami Attenberg
#53. When I'm writing, really writing, everything but breathing is an ignorable distraction.
Dennis R. Miller
#54. Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.
Joyce Carol Oates
#55. Daniel, I was asked of a budding author, how do you know if your story is on track? My answer: I start by knowing my intention, my target. Then, with purpose, I write the scene that unfolds before me, as faithfully as is human. - Daniel LaMonte
Daniel LaMonte
#56. Putting a piece of you in your protagonist adds depth and merges the worlds of fiction and reality.
Adam Steven Page
#57. I've had a fountain pen surgically implanted in my left index finger to save trouble. My body is tattooed with line upon line of truth, fiction, and a not-always-pleasing mix of the two.
Chila Woychik
#58. There were no absolutes in fiction, no certain way to deliver what was needed. So it was no surprise most technical writers considered novel-writing a gateway to madness.
S.A. Reid
#59. The characters act for reasons that they can't control and, as readers, we have to believe in their motivations, their sense of choice and in the reality of their suffering, even though, deep down, we know it's all just puppetry on the part of the writer.
Johnny Rich
#60. Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out.
John Updike
#61. Write in pictures. With your words, let the reader see not letters, but images. Be specific about every detail, but don't describe it
make it happen on the page, if you were writing fiction, or make it happen over again, if you were writing about history or some recent event.
A.A. Patawaran
#62. I honestly believe that everything I know about the writing of non-fiction (or writing) could be engraved on the head of a pin with a garden hoe ...
M.F.K. Fisher
#63. I'm such a huge fan of fan fiction, to me it's a great way for readers to become writers. It's like putting the training wheels on for writing.
Hugh Howey
#64. One of the joys of writing historical fiction is the chance to read as much as you like on a pet subject - so much that you could easily bore your friends senseless on the topic.
Deanna Raybourn
#65. I go on writing in both respectable and despised genres because I respect them all, rejoice in their differences, and reject only the prejudice and ignorance that dismisses any book, unread, as not worth reading."
"On Despising Genres," essay
Ursula K. Le Guin
#66. Biographies are best when written chronologically. Boring people don't make for good biographies.
Deana J. Driver
#67. 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.
Patricia MacLachlan
#68. I do write fiction, and I find it more difficult, but also more liberating. On the one hand, you can make up the story, but you have to make up the story.
Emily Susan Rapp
#69. Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos ... to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.
John Cheever
#70. Changing imagination into fiction is what I love to do.
Eveli Acosta
#71. Nobody wants to be a part of your story. Everybody wants you to elaborate on their fantasies.
Michael Bassey Johnson
#72. For me, the historical and genealogical library is the one I use. I'm working on, I'll say, it's a time travel novel. I haven't written very much of it. That's the dirty secret of the Cullman center: The writers don't write their fiction there, they just do their research.
Andrew Sean Greer
#73. A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.
Tim O'Brien
#74. Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction can be difficult, lonely job; it's like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.
Stephen King
#75. I would rather never make a penny on book sales and know that many had derived some fair pleasure from my writing, than to know that very few had ever taken a chance on my work. I certainly won't last forever, but I'd love to think that my imagination will continue to surface in the minds of others.
Eric Diehl
#76. That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.
Tim O'Brien
#77. In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully. You can't let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.
Alan Lightman
#78. All fiction is based on fact and moves into fantasy. It is the writer's task to make the unbelievable believable.
Chloe Thurlow
#79. When I first started drawing the earliest incarnation of 'Optic Nerve,' I hadn't even been on a date; I hadn't had a romantic relationship of any kind yet, so in a way, I was almost writing science fiction.
Adrian Tomine
#81. I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I'm doing fiction.
Gore Vidal
#82. I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer's creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen.
Laura Hillenbrand
#83. Treat backstory like a pungent spice. I say this to encourage you to picture a jalapeno pepper that can set your mouth on fire, every time you even think about adding backstory into your book.
What you need is subtlety.
Sandy Vaile
#84. A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf
#85. [Jack] Kerouac was writing fiction. What he did when he wrote about me ... he made me out with Russian Countesses and Swiss accounts and other things I didn't have or didn't happen and so on.
William S. Burroughs
#86. On writing: I don't like doing this, but it feels so good when I stop.
Richard Ford
#87. If one were to include one-tenth of the remarkable people one knows, in one's fiction, no one would accept it. Real life remains one's private menagerie.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#88. Some things are just like riding a bicycle; you jump on, pedal, and hope you don't fall.
Henry Mosquera
#89. I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.
John Hawkes
#90. As long as you have ideas, you can keep going. That's why writing fiction is so much fun: because you're moving people about, and making settings for them to move in, so there's always something there to keep working on.
Guy Davenport
#91. I first started writing historical fiction in the late '70s and kept pictures of Kathleen Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers on my refrigerator until my first book was published by Avon in 1982. The biggest advantage of this genre for me is that it allows me to blend fact and fiction.
Virginia Henley
#92. See, I have no journalism in my background, so I wasn't practised at research or writing non-fiction, nor at handling the truth in a journalistic way. Journalists know when to call a halt and write something, but I kept on looking for answers.
John Sladek
#93. The difference between real life and a story is that life has significance, while a story must have meaning.
The former is not always apparent, while the latter always has to be, before the end.
Vera Nazarian
#94. Truth? How can you get truth out of fiction?"
Kieler from Zotikas: Attraction and Repulsion
Episode 3
Tom Bruno
#95. The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own.
Stephen King
#96. Homo Americanus is going to go on speaking and writing the way he always has, no matter what dictionary he owns.
Kurt Vonnegut
#97. Are you imperfect, romantically irrational, ridiculously fearless, and utterly illogical? You're my ideal reader, friend, partner. I'm your fan.
Brook Tesla
#98. In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.
Lauren Groff
#99. Perhaps this is the purpose of all art, all writing, on the murders, fiction and non-fiction:
Simply to participate.
Alan Moore
#100. Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions, The Tempest as written by isolate Miranda, raised on the romances in her father's library.
Michael Chabon
