Fiction Writers Quotes - Page 2

• Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

  Alice Munro

  Writing, People, Anecdotes

  FaceBook post by Alice Munro from Sep 17, 2011

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• Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created - nothing.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Writing, Individual, Type

  "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz: And Other Stories".

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• My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.

  Joseph Conrad

  Writing, Trying, Tasks

  The Nigger of the Narcissus preface (1897)

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• Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Writing, Editors, Rejection

  Kurt Vonnegut (1982). “Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage”, Dell Books

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• Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Writing, Schizophrenia, Form

  Interview in "Writers at Work" (The Paris Review Interviews), 8th Series, 1988.

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• The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.

  Mark Twain

  Writing, Character, Land

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• The writer's genetic inheritance and her or his experiences shape the writer into a unique individual, and it is this uniqueness that is the writer's only stuff for sale.

  James Gunn

  Writing, Unique, Inheritance

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• The best time to plan a book is while you're doing the dishes.

  Agatha Christie

  Time, Book, Memorable

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

  Ray Bradbury

  Inspirational, Writing, Reality

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• The greatest rules of dramatic writing are conflict, conflict, conflict.

  James Frey

  Writing, Conflict, Dramatic

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• A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

  Richard Bach

  Perseverance, Writing, Editing

  Richard Bach (2012). “A Gift of Wings”, p.9, Dell

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• Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

  W. H. Murray

  Inspirational, Life, Motivational

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• If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative.

  Woody Allen

  Inspirational, Motivational, Positive

  "Shakespeare, Woody Allen And A Certain Qantas A380" by Christine Negroni, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 23, 2012.

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• Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.

  John W. Campbell

  Home, Editors, Writing And Reading

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• The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Visible, Universe

  Gustave Flaubert (2009). “Madame Bovary”, p.16, Hackett Publishing

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• If you start with a bang, you won't end with a whimper.

  T. S. Eliot

  Writing, Bangs, Ends

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• If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Writing, Technology, Fiction

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.169, Grove Press

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• Writing is the hardest work in the world not involving heavy lifting.

  Pete Hamill

  Writing, World, Heavy

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• I tell my students there is such a thing as 'writer's block,' and they should respect it. You shouldn't write through it. It's blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven't got it right now.

  Toni Morrison

  Block, Writing, Students

  Toni Morrison, Danille Kathleen Taylor-Guthrie (1994). “Conversations with Toni Morrison”, p.159, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

  James A. Michener

  Writing, Swings, Emotion

  Ernest Hemingway, James A. Michener (1986). “The dangerous summer”, Scribner Book Company

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• Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

  Stephen King

  Life, Beautiful, Truth

  Stephen King (2011). “Danse Macabre”, p.430, Simon and Schuster

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• The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.

  William Faulkner

  Dream, Writing, Artist

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• If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

  Lillian Hellman

  Inspirational, Writing, Talking

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  Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Honesty, Integrity, Writing

  1847; quoted by propagandist and language maven William Safire, New York Times Magazine, 13 December 1998.

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• Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Nature, Rain, Writing

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