Fiction Writing Quotes

As Dorothy J. Heydt famously said, the eight deadliest words for any work of fiction are 'I don't care what happens to these people.

Authors are supernatural beings. They exist in the world, also in worlds they create, and in the worlds of other authors they read.

The details of what we call our lives go sometimes to form patterns of meaning not unlike those to be found in our preferred sort of fiction.

When the imagination takes over, the second hand could be the hour hand to a creator of stories.

The only thing better than a well-read book is a well-read book only read by yourself.

The imagination is a wild and dangerous forest that is impossible to know the full might of.

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.

My greatest qualification for writing fiction was my ability, as a child, to lie with a straight face.

Darling, in this family we don't call anyone a novelist who has not written more books than Jane Austen.

If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people.

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.

I have no problem in moving a date one way or another or coming up with a subplot that gets my characters in (or out) of a fix more rambunctiously than the extant records show.

Careless and not particularly biting, it was easier to shrug off than anything in the first book which depicted me as an inarticulate zombie confused by the irony of Randy Newman's "I Love L.A.

...I retreat into my fictional world where everything makes sense - but even there I can't even control what people do...

I long for the day I no longer long for him.

We’re making strange fictions of strange things inside ourselves.

In writing, there is art. And in art there is craft ...

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

Good science fiction has its roots in good science.

To everyone who thinks writing a sequel should be easy because you've already clreated the universe: Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha! Heh. No.

May it be written. May it be done.

If you can read the book and say, ‘Space Marines, YEEEAAAHHH!’ That’s Military Science Fiction.” (Brigham Young writing lecture, March 2012)

You need to take some acting classes to learn to hide your huge crush on my husband better

She would keep playing the role of the winner as long as the audience believed her.

The longer I don't write, the more I hurt.

No one ever tells you that: that there’s no method. Writing’s a lawless place.

The table was covered with food like roast chicken, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, roast turkey, roast liquorice and, the centrepiece, a roasted knight.

That woman must have been a husky in a previous life.

To be stories at all they must be a series of events: but it must be understood that this series - the plot, as we call it - is only really a new whereby to catch something else.