Quotes About Fiction Writing

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. I researched fiction writing for months before I taught my first class, much of it looking for strong techniques from bestselling authors.

James Thayer

#4. The first time I took a fiction writing class was sophomore year. And I just found myself taking that extremely seriously, in a way that I didn't take anything else seriously. So I guess that was the start of it.

John Brandon

#5. Never believe that the fiction writing life makes sense ... It's insanity by definition.

Jo Beverley

#6. Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

Robert Morgan

#7. From my years of teaching creative writing, I know that new writers take the setting for granted, as simply a place to set the action, but setting is a vital element in fiction writing and deserves serious treatment.

Garry Disher

#8. Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people.

Ayana Mathis

#9. Nothing was a natural predator of productive fiction writing like the cell phone. Ditto the laptop. As she had well learned, the laptop could destroy a day.

Elin Hilderbrand

#10. No formal course in fiction-writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce.

H.P. Lovecraft

#11. I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that's needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa.

John Dalton

#12. Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.

Paul Theroux

#13. Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.

Alan Lightman

#14. If you record the world honestly, there's no way people can stop being funny. A lot of fiction writing doesn't get that idea, as if to acknowledge it would trivialize the story or trivialize human nature, when in fact human nature is reduced and falsified if the comic aspects are not included.

Lorrie Moore

#15. Once you're imagining being the main character, and you're having the conversations and actually being there, the magic in fiction writing takes over.

Will Hobbs

#16. For me, writing plays is far more an act of the mind than of the emotions. It's a very different kind of impulse than fiction writing.

Jim Grimsley

#17. I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.

Eleanor Catton

#18. Fiction writing is very seldom a matter of saying things; it is a matter of showing things. However,

Flannery O'Connor

#19. When I was in high school and college, my other real focus was, actually, fiction writing. So in college, I had done all these seminars with these various writers-in-residence.

Lily Rabe

#20. People love gossip because it's slightly removed from actuality. It's a very literary thing ... You can hear a great story, and it turns out that it's largely not true. Fiction writing is like gossip. It's not malicious gossip, but it's gossip.

Lorrie Moore

#21. I do really enjoy Jay McInerney's wine writing. He's a good writer. He brings his fiction-writing skillset. He's not afraid to put wine in kind of a racy context and speak very candidly about it.

Mike D

#22. Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

Ivana Trump

#23. A lot of crime fiction writing is also lazy. Personality is supposed to be shown by the protagonist's taste in music, or we're told that the hero looks like the young Cary Grant. Film is the medium these writers are looking for.

Peter Temple

#24. I gave up worrying about the principles of fiction writing when I realized that there weren't any.

Teri Louise Kelly

#25. Fiction writing is a strange business when you think about it. You sit down and weave a network of lies to explore deeper truths.

Wally Lamb

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. In fiction writing, I would say there are several different strands that have been woven through my own writing, and each influenced by a different group of writers.

Alan Lightman

#29. Fiction and screenwriting blend for me. I feel like being a TV writer/screenwriter has definitely made my fiction writing better, although I have less time to do it.

Nick Antosca

#30. fiction writing can be a blast when you set aside debilitating notions of perfection and just dive headlong into the creative process.

Chris Baty

#31. Fiction writing feels more honest to me.

David James Duncan

#32. I just ... ," Cath started again: "I realized that I'm not cut out for fiction-writing."
Professor Piper blinked and pulled her head back. "What are you talking about? You're exactly cut out for it. You're a Butterick pattern, Cath
this is what you were meant to do.

Rainbow Rowell

#33. When I was hired by the University of Washington extension school to teach the one-year fiction writing course - 96 classroom hours - I quickly determined that I knew only about an hour's worth off the top of my head.

James Thayer

#34. Fiction writing is a kind of magic. If I communicate the magic spell ... it loses its force for me.

Angus Wilson

#35. I think every writer of detective fiction writing today has been influenced by Mr. Parker. I'm of a generation that followed Robert Parker, and it was impossible to read the genre and not be influenced by him.

Robert Crais

#36. I took two fiction-writing courses in college and majored in literature. I felt that I had a knack though I wouldn't go so far as to call it a talent. But it scared me. I felt it was a childish thing wanting to write and that I would forget about it eventually.

Ben Fountain

#37. What you create when you're teaching fiction writing is a kind of literary salon, not a social club or a mutual admiration society, not a debating society, not a repair shop, not a fight club or a soap box. It's a place to have a conversation about a story.

John Dufresne

#38. We were given clear concrete tools. The course did a great job demystifying the art of fiction writing and fostering confidence. The instructor brought complex concepts down to earth. I will miss coming here every week.

Miguel Ferrer

#39. It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.

Alexander Chee

#40. The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull - to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.

George Saunders

#41. Fiction writing is a twenty-four-hou r-a-day occupation. You never leave your work behind. It is always with you, and to some extent, you are always thinking about it. You don't take your work home; your work never leaves home. It lives inside you. It resides and grows and comes alive in your mind.

Terry Brooks

#42. My first and biggest love was always fiction writing. But it is a very lonely pastime.

Etgar Keret

#43. You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing - your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.

David Foster Wallace

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

Susan Orlean

#45. I love long sentences. My big heroes of fiction writing are Henry James and Proust - people who recognise that life doesn't consist of declarative statements, but rather modifications, qualifications and feelings.

John Burnside

#46. I feel like some sort of fiction-writing hobo, jumping trains and always hoping I'll find a good place to start a fire in the next town. And I keep having these panicky episodes where I corner my husband and rant at him: 'I don't have anywhere to write! I can't write! I don't have a place to write!'

Rainbow Rowell

#47. This sounds like a cliche, but I always wanted to write. After college, I did some writing and realized very quickly that it's hard to make a living as a writer. At that point, I was more interested in fiction writing.

Hooman Majd

#48. The desire to confess ... lies at the root of most fiction writing ...

Lucy Poate Stebbins

#49. 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

#50. My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

Tom Bissell

#51. First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.

Kathy Acker

#52. Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

Paul Harding

#53. Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.

James Rollins

#54. I've always thought that science and fiction writing have a lot in common because they're both about modeling reality.

Scott Westerfeld

#55. I was an avid reader, but never thought seriously about writing a novel until I was in my thirties. I took no formal fiction-writing courses and never thought about these categories when I wrote my first novel.

M.J. Rose

#56. My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#57. I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.

Alexander Chee

#58. 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

#59. In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.

Maria Semple

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

Gore Vidal

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

Stephen King

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

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

F.K. Preston

#67. You learn a lot, writing fiction.

Penelope Lively

#68. 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

#69. 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

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

Mary Robinette Kowal

#71. 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

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

C. Kennedy

#73. 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

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

Criss Jami

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

Norman Mailer

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

Randy Mitchell

#77. 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

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

Robert Hass

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. 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

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

Wally Lamb

#87. 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

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

Paul Di Filippo

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

Phil Klay

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

Sheila Heti

#91. 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

#92. [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

#93. 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

#94. 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

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

Cynthia Ozick

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

Neil Gaiman

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

Etgar Keret

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

Kurt Vonnegut

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

Rose Wilder Lane

#100. 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