Fiction Writing Quotes

Truth maybe stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.

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

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 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.

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

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 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.

In a sense who you are has always been a story that you told to yourself. Now your self is a story that you tell to others.

It's important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he's writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering.

Every person has a range. In fiction, you get to be it all. I’m as much the men in my book as I am the women. I write how I write and there is no mission to stake a claim.

I love writing fiction - you can take just what you want from a place, and leave the rest.

I've never been very attached to genre labels and never set out intentionally to write historic fiction. Besides, what you consider historic depends on how far back your memory extends.

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.

Human life is fiction's only theme.

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.

I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.

For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent.

The reason we write fiction is because it's so much easier to exist spending part of each day in an imaginary world.

I never wanted my books to be mistaken for poetry or fiction books; I wanted to write reference books. But instead of referring to something, they refer to nothing.

There was a price to be paid for being interested in fiction and in writing, pushing my family away. Books and authors became my family.

Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels.

We are living in an era of such interesting new forms, and certainly narrative non-fiction has emerged as a major form. People who are great writers don't have to write novels anymore.

Fiction must convince our bodies for it to have any chance of convincing our minds.

The emotional tone or affect of the tale should be hot and engaged, not remote and dispassionate.

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

Science fiction is not about the freedom of imagination. It's about a free imagination pinched and howling in a vise that other people call real life.

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.

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

The twentieth century saw a professionalization of fiction writing, particularly in its second half and particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world - not so much mainland Europe, for example.

I have to say that writing about my writing process is more daunting than writing non-fiction.

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

I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.

In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.

I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.

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.

I'm not a reader of young adult fiction for the simple reason that these novelists are writing for adolescents, so they are not writing for me.

If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.

Somebody once said to me if you want to be understood, don't write fiction.

I feel I'm functioning at some level as a journalist because even though I write fiction, I'm trying to get the world accurate.

I think anyone who writes suspense fiction and says that King isn't an influence is either lying or being foolish.

What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not writing, it's deciding what to write.

Dramatic fiction - William Shakespeare made his biggest mark writing dramatic love stories.

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

The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.

The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.

I like writing non-fiction - and when you pick a [non-fiction] subject, it saves you the hassle of coming up with a plot.

I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation.

I always wanted to write fiction. Always. As far back as I can remember it's been integral to my sense of myself - everything else was always a displacement activity.