On Writing Fiction Quotes

On Writing Fiction Quote of the day

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.

All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.

Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.

I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.

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.

The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.

Great fiction can often present moral messages with greater power and clarity than instructional writing - since literature, after all, penetrates not just the intellect, but the imagination.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

I write fiction. I make things up, it's what I do.

I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.

One learns much more by writing fiction, because the insights come from those deeper subconscious levels where the greater and more interesting truths lie.

Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.

Fiction is about stuff that's screwed up.

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

He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.

All fiction becomes autobiographical when the author has true talent.

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.

Metafiction says something. It has to do with taking a large fiction itself and writing within it; that kind of self-reflecting writing that emerges from it can be thought of as metafictional.

In a good play, everyone is in the right.

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.

When I write fiction, I never try to deliver a message; I just want to tell a story. But I admit that I want the story to be memorable and the characters to touch the reader's heart.

I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.

All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

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.

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.

Fiction must compete with first-rate reporting. If you cannot write a story that is equal to a factual account of battle in the streets or demonstrations, then you can't write a story.

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything.

Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.

I have to do more close research and fact checking for the science fiction. This is not however to say that writing good fantasy does not involve doing good research.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

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

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

I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.

Number one rule for fiction: Coincidence can be used to worsen a characters predicament, but never to solve his problems.

Writing fiction is an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.

To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.

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.

With fiction, it could be about anything. It just has to be good writing, like Maria Semple's "Where'd You Go, Bernadette," which I read recently. I want to forget I have a book in my hand.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are purely imaginary.

Fiction is the most joyous, beautiful, sophisticated, wonderful thing in the world.

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

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

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

If you're a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don't censor, don't control. Listen, and write.

I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.

Anyone can write a specification, but if nobody implements it, what is it but a particularly dry form of science fiction.

I had been writing fiction since I was in eighth grade, because I loved it.

When I was younger I wanted to be a big movie star who'd get to be funny on talk shows and then I wanted to retire and write science fiction.

For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures.