On Writing Fiction Quotes

I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.

Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it's like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.

When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.

Writing fiction is an act of imagination and fantasizing, and it's not relating in prose what you've been doing for the last two or three years.

Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you'll soon figure out why - written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word.

Our minds simply don't function in some sort of narrative chronology. I think that one of the great gifts of writing fiction is being able to think about that.

The best writing advice I ever got was "Keep moving forward, don't retreat into rewrites." The worst came from a book that said "Writing fiction is like telling lies," which just seems stupid to me.

After writing fiction for so long, I like the discovery element of nonfiction, in the sense that when you find the right information, it feels like gold.

Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language.

Expressing political opinion can be a powerful way to establish a character's voice when writing fiction.

For me, writing plays is far more an act of the mind than of the emotions. It's a very different kind of impulse than fiction writing.

When you're writing fiction, you don't have notes necessarily. You don't carve it, it's not like a piece of sculpture, it's more like water color.

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

Nonfiction gives you subjects. Writing fiction I can have more fun, but I have to invent my subject.

I've always felt that the basic unit of writing fiction is the sentence, and the basic unit of the screenplay is the scene.

The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.

Writing fiction means putting a lot of what you believe about the world at risk, because you have to follow your characters.

...writing fiction...is no job for intellectual cowards.

You have to write fiction that mirrors the actual world, which has people of all sorts in it.

I'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.

I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.

I, as the writer, can be very clear that I am writing a work of heightened fiction, as opposed to documenting horrible things that happen every day in the world. Which I have no interest in doing.

Academic writing you have to get right. Fiction you have to get plausible. And there's a world of difference.

I do write fiction, and I find it more difficult, but also more liberating. On the one hand, you can make up the story, but you have to make up the story.

I think to write fiction, this is just how I see it, you have to have a powerful need/desire to connect. I can't. Wanting to and not being able to has lead to a lot of misery in my life.

When I read any book, if it's really good I get lost in the writing whether it's fiction or non-fiction. I'm in the story not thinking about who wrote it.

That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.

They say that every writer, they write about himself, and I think that to a certain extent that is true. But also we are creators of fiction.

I'd like to write fiction. Perhaps at some stage.

I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.

I like to read fiction best and I like to write fiction, too.

And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.

Topiary has always seemed like a good occupation, comparable in some ways to writing short fiction.

I honestly believe that everything I know about the writing of non-fiction (or writing) could be engraved on the head of a pin with a garden hoe.

That's the wonderful thing about writing, you can take things you haven't done properly in your own life and make it better in fiction.

I don't think the function of writing, at least for me as a fiction writer, is to say to people, "Here's the answer." It's not an op-ed.

Being a writer of fiction isn't like being a compulsive liar, honestly.

All fiction is lies – if it weren’t, it would be biography, history, or reportage.

I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can’t be like any other author’s really.

I don't really have those kinds of intentions when I write a scene. I try to follow the internal logic of the fiction, rather than make an argument or an assertion.

If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.

As with all other aspects of fiction, the key to writing good dialogue is honesty.

I write fiction, there's no guarantee that what I say is truthful.

I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford.

Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.

That's the wonderful thing about drama and writing and fiction: it's this wonderful shared experience that we all have. We can see into each other's lives.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

It is true that I didn't write any poetry between 1995 and 2011. The reason for this was probably because I had stayed away from fiction for so long and couldn't tear myself away from it.

It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut—it’s the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.

Ideas either age like fine wine or rot like potatoes over time.