Top 100 Writing Genre Quotes
#1. Thanks to the success of Henning Mankell and Peter Hoeg, there wasn't the same stigma attached to writing genre thrillers in Scandinavia as there was in many other cultures. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Jo Nesbo
#2. When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. However beautiful it looked, it needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.
Mark Haddon
#3. While writing a novel I almost completely stop reading books in the same sub-genre for the duration.
Charles Stross
#4. I do teach fiction and non-fiction, and usually I'm interested in works that confuse genre, but I'm very new to teaching creative writing, I don't have an MFA, or a PhD, I tend to approach it just through my own practice.
Kate Zambreno
#5. 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
#6. Writing is a struggle no matter what the genre.
Susan Wiggs
#7. 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
#8. You usually find me writing what I like to think of as intelligent summer action and genre films.
Max Landis
#9. Urban Fantasy is the orphan left on the doorstep that no-one knows what to do with.
Tracy Cooper-Posey
#10. A good ground rule for writing in any genre is, start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself. Ask what it's afraid of, what it's trying to hide - then write that.
M. John Harrison
#11. When I began to cover songs for YouTube, they all tended to be in the super pop-genre.. as in, smash-hit songs. My writing process was heavily influenced by this - I went from a more heavy punk rock style to straight up sugary-sweet pop.
Alex Goot
#12. No amount of therapy can replace the joy of revenge writing.
Mylo Carbia
#13. Sometimes I write music, sometimes I don't. I think I'm just writing more what's close to my heart, and musical stuff is close to my heart, and it's fun to write, and when something's fun to write you don't think about what statement you're trying to make or what genre you're trying to hone in on.
Rachel Bloom
#15. We have a history in country music of writing about the darker side of things - maybe not as much in modern times, but there's a lot of cheating and self-deprecation. We sort it out in song, in country music, as a genre.
Chris Stapleton
#16. I love my career. It is a career. A difficult one that takes many hours and total dedication to my craft. It is also what I was born to do
tell stories and entertain.
Michelle M. Pillow
#17. Realism isn't something most people associate with the fantasy genre, yet it's an essential element of great fantasy writing.
Lynn Flewelling
#18. Good writing is good writing no matter what genre you're writing in, and I believe that there are only a handful of fundamental craft tools that are essential for any genre-including nonfiction.
Georgia Heard
#19. The novel is a hybrid genre and a large part of its charm arises from the alluvial nature of its materials. There is nothing that doesn't suit a novelist in action, when he's in the course of writing his novel.
Enrique Vila-Matas
#20. Books in the YA genre, in particular, should use proper grammar because they're more of an example to young people than adults books are.
Laura Kreitzer
#21. The ideal for me is to mix it up. When I have a writing workshop, I like to have people that are anthropologists and people who are poking around in other fields, I like to have them all in the same workshop, and not worry about genre.
Sandra Cisneros
#22. Westerns have often been considered the ugly stepchild of genre writing...
Johnny D. Boggs
#23. Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.
Ted Chiang
#24. When I finally got tired of arguing with her and decided to write a novel as if I was some kind of formulaic, genre writing drone, just to prove to her how awful it would be, I wrote the first book of the Dresden Files.
Jim Butcher
#25. The biggest challenge of my career, which is something that authors of genre fiction face all the time, is writing something fresh and new and at the same time meeting reader expectations.
Julia Quinn
#26. There is nothing I can't do writing in Fantasy. I can have romance, I can have mystery, I can have drama, I can have good characters - I can have everything you can do in any other genre ... plus a dragon.
Patrick Rothfuss
#27. Crime writers, I've noticed, can be jumpy. They live in a world where there are murderers on the loose and they haven't been caught yet!
Sara Sheridan
#28. I am not a fan of the magical quick fix in any fiction, including fantasy, scifi and comic books. Unless Dr. Who is involved, and then only because we get to use the phrase 'Timey-wimey wibbliness' which, I'm sure you'll agree, there are not enough occasions to drop into ordinary adult conversation.
Chris Dee
#29. I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form.
Sue Grafton
#30. I know a lot of writers, and everyone works differently, but this is something that we truly have in common across all genres - the fiction has to be real inside your head.
Sara Sheridan
#31. There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.
Margaret Atwood
#32. Revenge writing is a female genre. Men who have been left by women or made cuckolds by rivals either lick their wounds in humiliated silence or start the Trojan Wars. Having no other power or public voice, the betrayed woman reaches for her pen.
Frances Wilson
#33. I can pretty much spend an entire week talking about how the writing process works, to be honest! It can really vary from project to project and is often dependent on when you're brought on board, the genre, the platform and the narrative desires of the project.
Rhianna Pratchett
#34. Horror, let's face it, is basically pretty dumb. You're writing about events that are preposterous, and the trick is to dress them up in language so compelling that the reader doesn't care.
T.E.D. Klein
#35. I don't really worry about whether things fit into a genre or not, it's whether I like it and whether the two things sit well together, that's my main criteria when I write.
Thighpaulsandra
#36. I love outsider stories. And I also like a lot of genre fiction, too. So I wanted to write a literary book that flirted with thriller and fantasy and even science fiction. I wanted the coming-of-age story and the love story to be about "outsiderdom" - one of the themes I am most interested in.
Porochista Khakpour
#37. Rather than thinking in terms of a specific genre or specific kind of thing, I hope I can just stay relatively small and keep making my movies. If I can keep writing them and making them, I'll be happy.
Rian Johnson
#38. The big trinity of publishing: mystery, thrillers and romance. If you can combine all three, then it's a winner's trifecta and you'll be rich beyond your dreams.
Dermot Davis
#39. Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you'll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other's work as someone working in the same genre.
Sara Sheridan
#40. Fantasy is my genre and my home in the writing world. I consider it the biggest writing room in all literature, where there are literally no boundaries at all.
Robin Hobb
#41. I don't want to be confined to one genre of writing because I don't read just one genre.
TaQuanda Taylor
#42. It's really not the genre for me, or the venue, it's the writing.
Kathy Najimy
#43. I knew I wanted to work with Brad [Falchuk] and Ian [Brennan] again on something comedic, and we are having a blast writing SCREAM QUEENS. We hope to create a whole new genre - comedy-horror - and the idea is for every season to revolve around two female leads.
Ryan Murphy
#44. There's a hardening of the culture. Reality TV has lowered the standards of entertainment. You're left wondering about the legitimacy of relationships. It's probably harder to entertain the same people with a more classic form of writing, and romantic comedies are a classic genre.
Nancy Meyers
#45. Not everyone will like your writing or genre. You may face challenges that will slow you down. Don't let that stop you. The first person you need to believe in is you.
Kathy Porter
#46. I get very frustrated by this term 'genre exercise.' I mean, what exactly is that? Genre is not really relevant when you are writing a song; hopefully you are doing it to explore something, to create something, and I don't agree that any of my albums are genre exercises.
Elvis Costello
#47. Maybe if I'd studied writing instead of anthropology, I'd be more sensible. You know - pick a genre, follow the rules, stay in the box - but let's face it. Sensible people don't major in anthropology.
Mary Doria Russell
#48. In my writing classes, I don't outlaw any genre writing.
Leni Zumas
#49. Write the best book you can, the one that demands to be written, no matter what genre it is. Even a trend the trades tell you has gone stale can be revitalized by a superb piece of writing. It'll never be revitalized by someone jumping on a trend bandwagon.
Jonathan Maberry
#50. To think of writing poetry as a "career" is not only ridiculous, it's dangerous. To the imagination. To the way one thinks of art. The reason poetry as a genre is so special is because it cannot be made a commodity.
Cate Marvin
#51. 'Midnight's Children' falls under the genre of post-colonial writing, and there is a range of writers like V.S. Naipaul and Salman who popularised it. 'Midnight's Children' was incredibly important in this canon.
Satya Bhabha
#52. What is good for you creatively is usually bad commercially. You thrive financially by sticking to a series and not fiddling about too much. You do yourself harm by moving away from the series and the genre. By trying things not based in that particular mode of writing, you will just lose readers.
John Connolly
#53. Modernist fiction is tied to problems of writers. Self-glorifying. Existential struggle. This has not been a big part of genre writing.
Paul Park
#54. I've found myself moved by letters and diaries in archives as well as trashy, summer blockbusters. It's possible to make a connection with any kind of writing - as long as the writing is good.
Sara Sheridan
#55. Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.
Alberto Manguel
#56. I love romantic comedies. I feel almost sheepish writing that, because the genre has been so degraded in the past twenty years or so that admitting you like these movies is essentially an admission of mild stupidity. But that has not stopped me from watching them.
Mindy Kaling
#57. His line was the jocundly-sentimental Wardour Street brand of adventure, told in a style that exactly met, but never exceeded, every expectation.
Rudyard Kipling
#58. I really love fantasy. I have to say it is my favourite genre to read and one of the genres I love the most to write.
Cassandra Clare
#59. Thomas Mann used to write education novels and now you can write an education memoir, and there are all these memoirs coming out now about people's relationships with books. Like anything else, these can be good or bad. The genre doesn't make it good or bad, it's the execution.
Marco Roth
#60. I write in every genre under the sun! Like, seriously. EVERY SINGLE ONE. Publishing, however, takes a bit more tact.
Darynda Jones
#61. There is a whole genre of funny travel writers - that's very popular. There's Bill Bryson and people who follow that route and sell travel writing through making people laugh. It's a very difficult group to take. The line between comedy and mockery is sometimes a bit thin.
John Gimlette
#62. And I've learned to hit the brakes at these kinds of stop signs rather than t-boning a tanker truck filled with 200 proof mediocrity.
Benjamin Kane Ethridge
#63. For those who resist the notion that the mainstream is a genre, we recommend that they browse the shelves of their local bookstore. For if the mainstream is not a genre, then it must necessarily embrace all kinds of writing: romance, adventure, horror, thriller, crime, and, yes, science fiction.
James Patrick Kelly
#64. My advice is to write about what you are interested in. If you read science fiction and fantasy, then write in that genre. If you read romance novels, then try writing one.
Michael Scott
#65. When aspiring writers ask me about how they should target their writing, I tell them to pay no attention to that kind of thing. It will restrict you. You will end up falling into stereotypes in an effort to tailor your work toward a perceived genre category.
Carrie Vaughn
#66. It is my writing dilemma. The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story.
John Le Carre
#67. I like good writing. I don't especially care what genre." Mary's
Gordon Hopkins
#68. Buffy the Vampire Slayer showed the whole world, and an entire sprawling industry, that writing monsters and demons and end-of-the-world is not hack-work, it can challenge the best. Joss Whedon raised the bar for every writer - not just genre/niche writers, but every single one of us.
Russell T. Davies
#69. 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
#70. I think authors are just realizing there's no real reason to feel limited to a narrow set of genre rules in their writing. There's no reason a mystery novel can't have fantastic elements in it. Similarly, there's no reason why your epic fantasy series can't have elements of a mystery.
Patrick Rothfuss
#71. If we don't keep people engaged, we're not going to move you. And if we move you, we've done something useful. That's what anybody who writes genre knows.
Akiva Goldsman
#72. I don't believe in landing on one genre. That's too limiting. I don't think about that when I'm writing and recording. I just make what I feel should happen. Genres almost feel like something that's more for the listener; a need to organize it in categories.
Brooke Waggoner
#73. 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
#74. One of the reasons I write in different genres is that I get to have the feeling - even fleetingly - that I'm not just writing like Baggott again. I can escape myself.
Julianna Baggott
#75. Don't let society's defined genre hold you down, be a free spirit and just write, let society be the one to decide where each piece fits in.
Uma Nnenna
#76. Fiction is people having extraordinary reactions to ordinary things, but in genre fiction, they have ordinary reactions to extraordinary things.
Mary Robinette Kowal
#77. I'd read books in Russian, and they would take me forever. I wanted to write a book that would last and would not be superficial. Siberian-travel writing is its own genre.
Ian Frazier
#78. A tight structural form opens possibilities. Take a pattern, an established model or sub-genre, and write to it. In writing, limitation gives freedom
W.G. Sebald
#79. For me, writing a song, I sit down and the process doesn't really involve me thinking about the demographic of people I'm trying to hit or who I want to be able to relate to the song or what genre of music it falls under.
Taylor Swift
#80. We can learn so much looking outside our core field of expertise.
Sara Sheridan
#81. Not writing is never an option. This is not words of advice. It's just literally never an option!
Lillian R. Melendez
#82. My novels are in the literature section as opposed to the romance section of bookstores because they're not romance novels. If I tried to have them published as romances, they'd be rejected. I write dramatic fiction; a further sub-genre would classify them as love stories.
Nicholas Sparks
#83. I would describe my style of songwriting as classic. I learned very early on and have stuck to the core principles of song structure regardless of which genre I'm writing in.
Wendy Starland
#84. I love reading and writing novels that don't fit nicely into a specific genre. But they also have to move. I want to be excited about each chapter, because otherwise why is it there?
Patrick Keithahn
#85. All writing and publishing is very difficult, regardless of genre. There are going to be obstacles no matter what.
Carrie Vaughn
#86. When I started really writing fantasy, one of the things I noticed was a real absence of sexuality in the genre at all. And it's such a profound part of the human experience that it's a really big thing to leave out.
Jacqueline Carey
#87. Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there.
Sara Sheridan
#88. The people who are writing online and the people in my genre of creative non-fiction exert a great deal more freedom that journalists are allowed to exert in their day-to-day work.
Lee Gutkind
#89. At the end of the day, I'm writing in a genre that isn't highly regarded.
Philippa Gregory
#90. In the industry, trying out new genres is not always encouraged but what I've discovered is that as a writer, a jaunt outside my comfort zone generally brings new skills to the main body of my work.
Sara Sheridan
#91. Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.
W. H. Auden
#92. As a screenwriter I'm often writing in genres where there have been thousands of movies; whereas when I direct movies they tend to be in between genres. They tend to have a little bit of a genre to them, but they're really about the people, and they're people we haven't met before.
John Sayles
#93. 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
#94. I find that writing is as magical as the genre I write in. When the story comes alive and takes over, it's truly a journey to another world.
K.M. Randall
#95. Author branding is the process of positioning an author as the center of attraction and influence, to be the preferred choice in a given theme, style, category, niche or genre
Bernard Kelvin Clive
#96. When students learn to wrestle with questions about purpose, audience, and genre, they develop a conceptual view of writing that has lifelong usefulness in any communicative context.
John C. Bean
#97. It's very important, at least to me as a writer, that there be some rules on the table when I'm writing. Rules come from genres. You're writing in a genre, there are rules, which is great because then you can break the rules. That's when really exciting things happen.
Lev Grossman
#98. Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.
Carlos Fuentes
#99. I write across several genres. I'm a slut for words. I can't keep it in my literary pants.
Fierce Dolan
#100. But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.
Charles Nodier
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