Fiction Writing Quotes

Fiction Writing Quote of the day

Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

If we can't write diversity into sci-fi, then what's the point? You don't create new worlds to give them all the same limits of the old ones.

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

As many authors have said, if the writer is not surprised by events, then chances are that the reader will not be either, and grow bored.

In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.

I never really saw myself as writing science fiction anyway.

That's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.

What's good about writing is that when you write novels or fiction, people can see that the problems in one region are similar to problems in another region.

The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction.

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

It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.

I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.

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

I believe some people are just too damn smart to write fiction.

That was asking a lot of my readers, I realized, but I was trying to write the novel I would most enjoy decoding.

Truth is always duller than fiction.

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.

One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

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.

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.

For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.

In a good play, everyone is in the right.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.

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.

I was looking at a lot of experimental writers, and I was very intrigued by short-short fiction, writers who would write little things, what I call buttons now, little vignettes.

It's easy to make up weird stuff. It gets trickier when you want the weird stuff to be interesting and make sense.

Why write about the past? Well, there's more of it.

I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.

I don't really have special rituals, but I don't try to write fiction unless I have a minimum of a few hours. For me, it takes a while to settle into a mode where I'm truly concentrating

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

I don't separate writing songs from poetry and short fiction. In the area where I work in my house, there's a word processor and a guitar.

When I was a kid, I got in trouble for lying a lot, and I had a teacher say, instead of lying, write it down, because if you write it down, it's not a lie anymore; it's fiction.

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.

I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore.

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

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.

You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.

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.

Whether it is done quickly or slowly, however splendid the results, the process of writing fiction is inherently, inevitably, indistinguishable from wasting time.

There is no such thing as too ordinary to write about, whether that's life or a scene in a novel. What's interesting to people, whether it's memoir or fiction, is the truth.

I love the secrecy of writing fiction. When I write a novel, I don't tell anybody what I'm doing. I'm living in my private world. And it's a great sensation.

I was 12 or 13 years old. So I started to write poetry and fiction, even though I was really into biology because my dad was a science teacher. I kept writing all those years.