Quotes About Fiction Writing

#1. Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.

Gore Vidal

#2. As with all other aspects of fiction, the key to writing good dialogue is honesty.

Stephen King

#3. Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.

Dean Wesley Smith

#4. 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

#5. There are times when I myself no longer know whether I said and did the things I report or whether I dreamed them up. Anyway, I always dream true. If I lie a bit now and then it is mainly in the interest of truth.

Henry Miller

#6. If I describe a person's physical appearance in my writing, which I often do, especially in fiction, I never say someone is "black" or "white." I may describe the color of their skin - black eyes, beige skin, blue eyes, dark skin, etc. But I'm not talking about race.

Jamaica Kincaid

#7. There is nothing to me but you. I know it's pathetic but, oh darling, it's true.

F.K. Preston

#8. You learn a lot, writing fiction.

Penelope Lively

#9. We have to learn not to feel guilty about letting our imagination browse around, and you know, in writing fiction particularly. But I think, in any kind of writing, we have to learn to allow ourselves to approach it in a contemplative way.

Sue Monk Kidd

#10. Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you'll soon figure out why - written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word.

Charles Stross

#11. Fiction is people having extraordinary reactions to ordinary things, but in genre fiction, they have ordinary reactions to extraordinary things.

Mary Robinette Kowal

#12. I don't really have those kinds of intentions when I write a scene. I try to follow the internal logic of the fiction, rather than make an argument or an assertion.

Rachel Kushner

#13. The Fiction defense. Sometimes I just need to use it.

C. Kennedy

#14. I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn't occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn't a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do.

Meghan Daum

#15. The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.

Criss Jami

#16. You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.

Norman Mailer

#17. Life is like a friendship, eventually it will end, by conflict or God's hand"
-Sons In The Clouds

Randy Mitchell

#18. With fiction, it could be about anything. It just has to be good writing, like Maria Semple's "Where'd You Go, Bernadette," which I read recently. I want to forget I have a book in my hand.

Cheryl Strayed

#19. It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Robert Hass

#20. 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

#21. That's the wonderful thing about drama and writing and fiction: it's this wonderful shared experience that we all have. We can see into each other's lives.

Uma Thurman

#22. History is about the untold story, and writing historical fiction is a wonderful way to present the past in a compelling and entertaining way.

Paul W. Feenstra

#23. As was the case in 'Darth Plagueis' - even going back as far as 'Cloak of Deception' - I was well aware that I was writing what used to be called 'men's adventure' fiction.

James Luceno

#24. The science fiction I write comes from a pretty deep pool of literature, not just from the reflection of other science fiction films, and I think that gives me somewhat deeper roots.

Jon Spaihts

#25. I want to do some fiction writing, I've had some pretty good luck with short stories, I'd like to do a couple of larger things.

Janis Ian

#26. I am a storyteller, spiraling fantasy and reality into mystical tales. That eerie space between fact and fiction, where only the brightest light can scare the shadows - you will find me there.

Sara Frost

#27. 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

#28. A fiction writer weaves a fabric of lies in hopes of revealing deeper human truths.

Wally Lamb

#29. I love writing both fiction and memoir. Both have unique challenges; bottom line, fiction is hard because you have to come up with the credible, twisty plot, and memoir is hard because you have to say something true and profound, albeit in a funny way.

Lisa Scottoline

#30. Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.

Paul Di Filippo

#31. Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure.

Phil Klay

#32. Writing fiction is a good way to inhabit other minds, if not other lives.

Sheila Heti

#33. I am not ultimately interested in writing fiction. I can't make things up. Or rather, I can only make things up about things that have already happened.

Alison Bechdel

#34. [Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!

Terry Pratchett

#35. Dave Eggers is a prince among men when it comes to writing deeply felt, socially conscious books that meld reportage with fiction. While A Hologram for the King is fiction ... it's a strike against the current state of global economic injustice.

Elissa Schappell

#36. People should know better than to be an ass in front of writers. We immortalize things. Lots of things. And we take liberties with character descriptions.

Michelle M. Pillow

#37. The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.

Cynthia Ozick

#38. I started out writing much more science fictiony stuff and writing about science fiction.

Neil Gaiman

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

Etgar Keret

#40. You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed.

Kurt Vonnegut

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

Rose Wilder Lane

#42. I haven't written a word of fiction since 2009. I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.

Philip Roth

#43. Writers who have the vision and the ability to produce real fiction do not produce unreal fiction.

Raymond Chandler

#44. For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.

Jonathan Lethem

#45. And then I met Jerry and he's such a creative fiction writer, and I don't know if there's ever been a team put together the way we are - where one person does the theological way out and suggestions, and the other person goes into the cave and does the fiction writing.

Tim LaHaye

#46. No one ever tells you that: that there's no method. Writing's a lawless place.

Naomi Wood

#47. You know you've spent a lot of time writing fiction when you meet a new person and instead of asking them about what they do, or where they're from, you ask "what's your backstory?

David Filmore

#48. Writers of fiction embellish reality almost without knowing it.

Aljean Harmetz

#49. Not many people were speaking truth to power in the '80s. I had a really good time doing it - I found it gratifying. It was a joy to have an opportunity to say what you believed. It's challenging to do it in fiction, but I liked writing the novels. I liked writing 'Democracy' particularly.

Joan Didion

#50. To me, cooking is man's natural activity. But I think writing is really hard. Certainly writing fiction is the hardest thing I've ever done.

Ruth Reichl

#51. He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.

Stephen King

#52. (Slap) "Owhhh ... " Raymond yelled as the Old Man's cane hit his face.

Judy Byington

#53. Writing fiction, like reading fiction, is a practice in empathy.

Jennifer Haigh

#54. 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

#55. I did not believe political directives could be successfully applied to creative writing ... not to poetry or fiction, which to be valid had to express as truthfully as possible the individual emotions and reactions of the writer.

Langston Hughes

#56. Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible.

C.S. Lewis

#57. Not to be too 'Tale of Two Cities' about it, but I find writing a memoir easier than writing fiction, and more difficult.

Darin Strauss

#58. If you have a big heart, you will live a large life.

Yvonne Jayne

#59. Every time I've had to do journalistic investigations, I've cursed, but later I discovered that it had helped me enormously with writing fiction. It's the one thing that can save me from becoming an academic writer.

Italo Calvino

#60. Good horror offers a sense of an upended, lawless world and that's appealing to anyone who grew up feeling like an outsider.

Christopher Rice

#61. 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

#62. February 9th was HIS day. The day he always striked.

Mary Papas

#63. Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence; many epic tales are pretty much epic crap.

Stephen King

#64. 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

#65. It takes a long time to write a book. I'm not going to spend that much time trying to deliver a message. The reason I do it is because I want to understand something myself. It's not a delivery device, it's an inquiry device. Didactic fiction to my mind never works. It backfires.

Ruth Ozeki

#66. If you can't challenge your own way of thinking, then you can't write various perspectives. The real world rarely agrees, which is also true in fiction.

G.P. Burdon

#67. Anyone can write a specification, but if nobody implements it, what is it but a particularly dry form of science fiction.

Ian Hickson

#68. Writing fiction is fundamentally an irrational act.

Dale Peck

#69. 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

#70. I'm not very popular, because they're bleak and they're mournful and all the rest of it and I get censorious reviews. But I'm only writing fiction. I'm not making munitions, so I think it's acceptable.

Anita Brookner

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

Sara Sheridan

#72. There are very few works of fiction that take you inside the heads of all characters. I tell my writing students that one of the most important questions to ask yourself when you begin writing a story is this: Whose story is it? You need to make a commitment to one or perhaps a few characters.

Julia Glass

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

Bangambiki Habyarimana

#74. But I hate things all fiction ... there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric - and pure invention is but the talent of a liar.

Lord Byron

#75. 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

#76. An unpublished writer should doubt themselves. They should constantly wonder whether what they're creating has merit. And then, having doubted, they should take up their pen and see if they can't make it better.

Johnny Rich

#77. I didn't lie, I was writing fiction with my mouth.
Homer Simpson

Matt Groening

#78. I think human beings exist in a social world. I write realistic fiction, and so it isn't that surprising that the social realities of their existence would be part of the story.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#79. I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.

Irvine Welsh

#80. When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.

Charles Baxter

#81. Two kinds of writers. One treats the world as if it were fiction; the other treats fiction as if it were the world.

Marty Rubin

#82. If fiction and fantasy books are escapism, then let an author write them so as to better equip the reader to face reality by the end.

Brett Armstrong

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

Alain De Botton

#84. Well, it's my voice, so it's more accessible that way, and there are also all sorts of things like plot and timelines that are already known entities, so for me, it's very different from writing fiction.

Alice Sebold

#85. When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies.

Irvine Welsh

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. I want to write some books. Books that have nothing to do with music, just some fiction type of books for a whole different audience of people.

Jhene Aiko

#89. 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

#90. Good science fiction has its roots in good science.

Dan Brown

#91. I think I view myself primarily as a fiction writer. Poetry is more of a "hobby," a time of rest from the hard work of writing fiction.

Yuriy Tarnawsky

#92. Convention itself, like metaphor itself, is not dead; but it is always dying.

James Wood

#93. I've had many students over the years, sometimes even very sophisticated students, who will be writing and will hit a wall. Often I find it's because they're working out of sequence. Maybe some people can do that, but I don't think that's how fiction works. It's a discovery.

T.C. Boyle

#94. Ultimately, nobody is predictable, least of all to himself ... there wouldn't be any point in writing fiction otherwise.

Jincy Willett

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

Jonathan Franzen

#96. It's kind of strange- in fiction you get to tell lies and are applauded for it.

Robert James Waller

#97. 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

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

Taiye Selasi

#99. 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

#100. I love storytelling when the writing spins through me like photons on their way to lighting the world.

Kay Kenyon