Fiction Writers Quotes - Page 4

• I think I view myself primarily as a fiction writer. Poetry is more of a "hobby," a time of rest from the hard work of writing fiction.

  Yuriy Tarnawsky

  Hard Work, Writing, Thinking

  "No Tall Tales: An Interview With Yuriy Tarnawsky". Interview With David Moscovich, www.raintaxi.com. 2012.

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• here are the top three global resources getting scarcer in the twenty-first century: ozone layer, rain forest, people eager to read the fiction of others. That's right, folks. For the first time in I believe written history, there are far more fiction writers on earth than fiction readers.

  Sandra Tsing Loh

  Book, Reading, Rain

  Sandra Tsing Loh (2002). “A Year in Van Nuys”, Three Rivers Press

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• As a fiction writer, one of things you learn is God lives in specificity. You know, human kindness is increased as we pursue specificity.

  George Saunders

  Kindness, Fiction, God Life

  "In Search For Answers, Author George Saunders Covers Trump Campaign". "Weekend Edition Saturday" with Lynn Neary, www.npr.org. July 9, 2016.

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• I remember I was very taken with a book called DreamTigers by [Jorge Luis] Borges. He was at the University of Texas, Austin, and they collected some of his writings and put them in a little collection. It's called DreamTigers in English, but it doesn't exist in Spanish. It's a little sampler. But that collection in English is what struck me, because in there he has his poems, and I was a poet as well as a fiction writer.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Book, Taken, Writing

  Source: quod.lib.umich.edu

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• I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Different, Fiction, Kind

  "Talking in Our Pajamas". Interview with Ruth Behar, quod.lib.umich.edu. Summer, 2008.

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• One of my favourite contemporary fiction writers is a Texan, Ben Fountain. His extraordinary novel, Billy Lynn's Long Half-Time Walk, all takes place within the half-time show at a Dallas Cowboys football game. No one has better summed up the American appetite for spectacle, the link between sports and politics, and the absolute madness of George W. Bush's Iraq War.

  Adam Hochschild

  Sports, Football, War

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• It's a scary thing for fiction writers, when you're always writing from the point of view both as and for someone who is different.

  Alice Mattison

  Writing, Views, Scary

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Incidentally, I am intrigued by how many European and Latin American writers expressed their political views in the columns they routinely wrote or write in the popular press, like Saramago, Vargas Llosa, and Eco. This strikes me as one way of avoiding opinionated fiction, and allowing your imagination a broader latitude. Similarly, fiction writers from places like India and Pakistan are commonly expected to provide primers to their country's histories and present-day conflicts. But we haven't had that tradition in Anglo-America.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Country, Latin, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• In effect, I grew up in a sort of timewarp, a place where times are scrambled up. There are elements of my childhood that look to me now, in memory more like the 1940s or the 1950s than the 1960s. Jack [Womack] says that that made us science fiction writers, because we grew up experiencing a kind of time travel.

  William Gibson

  Memories, Childhood, Looks

  Source: craphound.com

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• My motto is: write about anything you bloody well like; just make sure you do it effectively. We've all had all the emotions, the rest is research and that leap which some can do and others cannot - it's not really something you can learn, otherwise all academics of literature would be wonderful fiction writers.

  Suhayl Saadi

  Writing, Would Be, Fiction

  "A new literary form is born: an interview with Suhayl Saadi". Interview With Sophie Erskine, www.3ammagazine.com.

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• Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.

  John Updike

  Fiction, Care, Becoming

  Source: www.achievement.org

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• Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

  Isaac Asimov

  Writing, Science, Fiction

  1975 'How Easy To See The Future', in Natural History, Apr.

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• Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.

  John le Carre

  Fiction, Knows, Credible

  "Master of the Secret World: John le Carré on Deception, Storytelling and American Hubris" by Andrew Ross, www.salon.com. October 21, 1996.

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• George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I'm 100 percent fiction writer... I don't want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don't state my political messages to anybody.

  Haruki Murakami

  Writing, Thinking, Political

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• It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Attachment, Fiction

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.131, Macmillan

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• A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it's not as satisfying in the end.

  Chaim Potok

  Writing, Fiction, Shapes

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• It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational - and I'm speaking the written science fiction, not 'Star Trek.' Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they're clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.

  Terry Pratchett

  Stars, Clever, Real

  "Sir Terry Pratchett: hallucinating gently for a living". Interview with Corinne Podger, www.abc.net.au. April 30, 2011.

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• Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.

  Stephen King

  Writing, Wish, Fiction

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• As a writer one doesn’t belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn’t belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.

  William Trevor

  Distance, Writing, Thinking

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• The only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers.

  Sheri S. Tepper

  Science, Views, Long

  "Sheri S. Tepper: Speaking to the Universe". www.locusmag.com. September 1998.

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• Me, I have a science fiction writer's conviction that the damn robot is supposed to speak
  human, not the other way around.

  Spider Robinson

  Robots, Fiction, Way

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• If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet... Sometimes you can go looking for illumination.

  Harold Brodkey

  Reality, Illumination, Drunk

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• It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Believe, Writing, Cells

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• The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert - in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again…no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.

  Daniel Levitin

  Basketball, Player, Numbers

  "Outliers: The Story of Success". Book by Malcolm Gladwell, November 18, 2008.

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• I think the one thing that's changed over time is that I've come to realise, as a fiction writer, the fact that I don't think it will work out, doesn't mean that it actually won't.

  Jennifer Egan

  Mean, Thinking, Work Out

  "A life in writing: Jennifer Egan". Interview with Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. May 6, 2011.

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