Top 100 Quotes About Writing Fiction
#1. 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
#2. Everyone who sits on a sofa watching 'Match of the Day' is a top soccer expert, as you know. So if you start to worry about such people reading your story and saying, 'That'd never happen' you're going to freeze up. You're writing fiction, and your characters can do whatever you need them to do.
Mal Peet
#3. Writing fiction is an act of imagination and fantasizing, and it's not relating in prose what you've been doing for the last two or three years.
Bret Easton Ellis
#4. Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.
Siri Hustvedt
#6. Once I got started, I wanted the life of a writer so fiercely that nothing could stop me. I wanted the intensity, the sense of aliveness that came from writing fiction. I'm still that way. My life is worth living when I've completed a good paragraph.
Lynne Sharon Schwartz
#7. Tweeting about objects means I don't need to bid on them, which is a blessing. Buying something is a way of saying, 'Look at this!' So is tweeting. So, I guess, is writing fiction.
Elizabeth McCracken
#8. I was an outsider, never quite part of what was going on, always looking in. It turned out to be great preparation for writing fiction.
Hallie Ephron
#9. Whether it is done quickly or slowly, however splendid the results, the process of writing fiction is inherently, inevitably, indistinguishable from wasting time.
Deborah Eisenberg
#10. Begin your writing, fiction or article, where the action begins. This action can be internal (e.g., an important insight or personal decision) or external (e.g., a murder or calamity). Begin too early, you lose your reader. Begin too late, you lose your story.
Walt Shiel
#11. There's something peculiar about writing fiction. It requires an interesting balance between seeing the world as a child and having the wisdom of a middle-aged person. The further you get from childhood and the experience of the teenage years, the greater the danger of losing that wellspring.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#12. As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.
Ayelet Waldman
#13. When writing fiction, memories still filter in, and these memories twist and distort and transform until they become living, breathing pieces of the story, as they have here.
Nova Ren Suma
#14. I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.
Judith Krantz
#15. 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
#16. I believe writing fiction is the mystical experience that allows me to break free of my human bonds, those so-called chains of thought, and create magic.
Tim Pompey
#17. Writing fiction is one of the greatest forms of empathy. It's not enough to simply write from the perspective of your characters...you have to feel what they feel.
Melody Robinette
#18. I loved writing fiction. I mean, once I found the character, or the characters, and knew who they were and knew their back-stories, it really - I mean, I went into my studio every day, thinking, 'What's gonna happen to Billy today?'
Ruth Reichl
#19. I think the thing that I lost in myself when I stopped writing fiction and the thing that I rediscovered and started mining again is, for lack of a better word, magic. It's the way you can brush up against the inexplicable and the mystical.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#20. If getting a contract was relatively straightforward, writing fiction was far harder than I could have imagined, and there were moments during the long and torturous edit process when it seemed that 'Zulu Hart,' the first of the trilogy, would never be fit for public consumption.
Saul David
#21. Writing fiction means putting a lot of what you believe about the world at risk, because you have to follow your characters.
Phil Klay
#22. You write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#24. I love stories, but writing fiction is another craft and I don't feel as if I have it.
Joan Larkin
#25. Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.
John Updike
#26. In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.
Amy Tan
#27. Finally, in my early 30s, I started writing fiction for the first time as an adult. That felt so scary, and I spent a few years feeling miserably 'behind' my high-achieving friends. But I persevered and obviously have no regrets.
Julia Glass
#28. The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.
Penelope Lively
#29. When I am writing political op-eds, I do think carefully about the impact of my words. When I am writing fiction, it's a different story. In my fiction I am more reckless. I don't care about the real world until I am done with the book.
Elif Safak
#30. To me, stretching the capabilities of my imagination is a crucial aspect of writing fiction; you could think of it as a mental form of athleticism.
Julia Glass
#31. When writing fiction, you only have to know enough to be convincing on the page. I mean really convincing, of course - but you don't need academic depth.
Simon Mawer
#32. I wrote six nonfiction books before getting into narrative fiction with 'Robopocalypse,' including 'How to Survive a Robot Uprising.' My goal all along was to start writing fiction, and I guess one day I'd just had enough.
Daniel H. Wilson
#34. There's a satisfaction I get from writing fiction that I will never get from screenwriting.
Jonathan Tropper
#35. I began writing fiction because it was the only way to tell all the intricacies of a real-life spy story.
David Ignatius
#36. When you're writing fiction, you don't have notes necessarily. You don't carve it, it's not like a piece of sculpture, it's more like water color.
Joan Didion
#37. When I'm writing fiction I'm thinking, God, this is so hard - I have to make all this stuff up! I wish I were writing a nonfiction book where all the facts are laid out and I don't have to be so much at sea.
Douglas Preston
#38. Writing fiction is fun. Writing non-fiction is life-changing.
A.D. Posey
#39. So for a long time, I did a lot of freelance writing in addition to writing fiction and such - I was a food critic for a magazine for a bit, I did writing for nonprofits and political things, I was the editorial consultant for another magazine for a couple years, all sorts of jobs.
Tod Goldberg
#40. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida likens writing fiction to a software code that operates in the hardware of your mind. Stringing together separate macros that, combined, will create a reaction.
Chuck Palahniuk
#41. I've been writing fiction probably since I was about 6 years old, so it's something that is second nature to me now. I just sit down and start writing. I don't sit down and start writing and it comes out perfectly - it's a process.
Candace Bushnell
#42. Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.
Buddy Ebsen
#44. Increasingly, those who used to teach and write critical or theoretical texts are writing fiction, poetry and so on; and kinds of texts are being produced that call for budding readers rather different from those who studied literature in the past.
Nicholas Royle
#45. Writing fiction is: Imagination and structure first and foremost - then revision, revision, revision! Then, revision!
Will Ottinger
#46. The people I meet in my life as a newspaper columnist are crazy and fascinating - although I love writing fiction some of the stuff that happens you just couldn't make up
Ros Reines
#47. You can't be wrong in journalism. Take a wrong turn in journalism, and you are writing fiction. You can take a wrong turn in poetry, and something wonderful can happen.
Eliza Griswold
#48. Expressing political opinion can be a powerful way to establish a character's voice when writing fiction.
Jen Lancaster
#49. Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.
Eudora Welty
#50. 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
#51. I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.
Karen Thompson Walker
#52. Before Arthur, I'd dismissed altogether writing fiction. You only have so many semi-sharp arrows in your quiver, I'd told myself, and I was not going to be able to write a novel.
Kevin Crossley-Holland
#53. When writing fiction, you learn to only put things and characters in, that are going to progress your story. There is something to be learned about that approach in real life
Carl Henegan
#54. If you haven't cried at least once while writing a chapter of your inspirational book, then you have to ask yourself if your're writing fiction.
Shannon L. Alder
#55. I love being a mom. But there's a certain kind of tedium to your life when your kid is young. Writing allows you to wander when your kid is napping in a crib ten feet away. So that's the great joy of writing fiction for me.
Gayle Forman
#56. One learns much more by writing fiction, because the insights come from those deeper subconscious levels where the greater and more interesting truths lie.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#57. The only 'ironclad rules' in writing fiction are the laws of physics and the principles of grammar, and even those can be bent.
Val Kovalin
#58. I have turned away from the thought of writing fiction in the past through what I suppose is, actually, fear. The direct, raw invitation for the reader to come in and explore my imagination is fairly scary for me so I have busied myself with so much else.
Dawn French
#59. 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
#60. I have to have music as a soundtrack to writing fiction. I listen to it at other times, too, but it helps me write.
Jeff VanderMeer
#61. I'm a novelist. I'm not a crusader, and I'm not an editorial writer. And I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.
Alice McDermott
#62. Our minds simply don't function in some sort of narrative chronology. I think that one of the great gifts of writing fiction is being able to think about that.
Dani Shapiro
#63. When I started writing fiction it always seemed in retrospect (I didn't realise at the time) that it was always caused by environments rather than by incidents and characters.
Jonathan Meades
#64. [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
#65. Writing fiction is the 'job' I try to keep at the center of things. The movie stuff has been a wonderful accident, though not entirely bizarre, either, as I have done some work in film before, and even directed a ridiculous, cable-access feature back in my 20s.
Jonathan Raymond
#66. The wonderful thing about writing fiction is that no one is stopping you. There's no one saying, 'You can't do that.'
Rebecca Stead
#67. The great thing about writing fiction is that you can do whatever the fuck you want, go as far as you are willing to go, and laugh at the people who take it seriously.
Richard P. Denney
#68. When you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world
Julian Barnes
#69. I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time.
Sue Monk Kidd
#70. 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
#71. People without hope do not write novels ... [Writing fiction] is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system. If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won't survive the ordeal.
Flannery O'Connor
#72. In writing fiction, I can be free. I can use my life. The raw material is my experiences.
Miriam Toews
#73. I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn't anyone?
C.S. Lewis
#74. It's much harder when you're writing about your life, than when you're writing fiction.
Leigh Newman
#75. Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That's probably as close to immortal as we'll ever get.
David Foster Wallace
#76. I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn't write again until I was a senior in college.
Janet Fitch
#77. At the age of seventeen, I decided I would spend my life writing fiction. I didn't know what this entailed, exactly - a room, I supposed. A room and books and paper and solitude.
Patrick DeWitt
#78. When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately.
John C. Hawkes
#79. I always say writing fiction isn't something you teach. It's something you do, and only experimentation - i.e. doing it, either badly or good sometimes - can help anybody get any better or worse at it.
Peter Orner
#80. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.
Roald Dahl
#81. One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people.
Deborah Eisenberg
#82. One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.
Marilynne Robinson
#83. I think that when you're writing fiction what you're doing is reflecting life as you see it, and putting down how you think and how other people think, and the sort of confusions that you don't normally like to admit to.
Helen Fielding
#84. Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness; and so a novel deserves a reader's attention only as long as the author sustains the reader's trust.
Jonathan Franzen
#85. It gives me confidence to know that what I'm writing has a veracity of its own without me having to invent it. When I'm writing fiction, I must believe it to be true, or I can see no point in it.
Michael Morpurgo
#86. 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
#87. I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.
Peter Straub
#88. Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, I've never had the sense I was 'making up' a character. It feels more like watching people reveal themselves, ever more deeply, more intimately.
Kathryn Harrison
#89. Writing fiction isn't about lying through your teeth, but more like, fibbing with a little class.
Anthony Mays
#90. I find it only natural for a storyteller to be interested in storytelling and, for anyone who spends the better part of his or her life writing fiction, it is hardly surprising that the pleasures, worries, and mechanics of fiction-making should enter the work.
Norman Lock
#91. I'm still an old-school reporter at heart. Writing fiction satisfies my journalistic need to hear and relay the testimony of everyday people at the center of events.
Karen Traviss
#92. I think one of the paradoxes of writing fiction is when people enjoy it, they want it to be real. So they look for connections.
Junot Diaz
#93. When you're writing fiction or poetry ... it really comes down to this: indifference to everything except what you're doing ... A young writer could do worse than follow the advice given in those lines.
Raymond Carver
#94. I'm really such a bumbler! Writing fiction is like arranging furniture in a dark room. I can't see what I'm doing. I grope for the right words. I bump against the wrong words and stumble and stub my toe and curse and keep trying to guess what belongs in the space.
Joanna Scott
#95. In 1970, at the age of 14, I entered a short story contest offering a grand prize of one dollar. I won. This was my first foray into writing fiction. I loved reading and thought that it shouldn't be so hard to write a story.
David Bergen
#96. I spend my life writing fiction, so reading fiction isn't much of an escape. That's not always true, but I don't read much contemporary fiction.
Alan Furst
#97. Writing fiction ... is no job for intellectual cowards.
Stephen King
#98. Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.
Flannery O'Connor
#100. 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
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