Fiction Writers Quotes - Page 5

• 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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• I came to the conclusion that I am not a fiction writer.

  Tim LaHaye

  Fiction, Conclusion

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• New fiction writers are a special breed in my estimation, and I never dreamed that so many people would be interested, but I remember being led by God

  Tim LaHaye

  People, Special, Would Be

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• There are no such things as happy endings. Never. They're totally manufactured by fiction writers who choose to end the story on a high point.

  Peter David

  Fiction, Stories, Happy Endings

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• I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face

  Caleb Carr

  Kids, Artist, Faces

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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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• There's a fine line between imagination and reality. An inventor dreams something up, and pretty soon, it's there on the table before him. A science-fiction writer envisions another world, and then some space probe finds it. If you believe in something strongly enough, I think you can make it happen.

  Ridley Pearson

  Dream, Believe, Reality

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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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• Arnošt Lustig is one of the leading contemporary Czech fiction writers, and certainly the most important Jewish writer of Bohemia to have survived the Holocaust.

  Josef Skvorecky

  Holocaust, Important, Fiction

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• I think songwriters are more related to fiction writers. The Odyssey was a story in song. To me, that's so beautiful, all those painted characters, all those travels and adventures.

  Regina Spektor

  Beautiful, Song, Adventure

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• Fiction writers can’t be trusted. They make things up.

  Dan Poynter

  Writing, Fiction, Trusted

  Dan Poynter (2000). “The Self-publishing Manual: How to Write, Print, and Sell Your Own Book”, Para Publishing

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• In fact, one could argue that the skill of the fiction writer boils down to the ability to exploit intensity.

  James Scott Bell

  Writing, Skills, Fiction

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• There's a perilous word fiction writers need to watch out for. The word is 'had.'

  James Scott Bell

  Watches, Needs, Fiction

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• Murderer who lives in my building. His name is Dan Bevacqua. Hes a fiction writer.

  Arda Collins

  Names, Fiction, Building

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• Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.

  Rudy Rucker

  Character, Work Out, Rude

  "Adventures In Gnarly Computation". www.rudyrucker.com. October 2005.

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• Understand now, I'm purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all the writers, keenly interested in human welfare whom I know, laugh at the prohibition law.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Believe, Law, Laughing

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• Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all.

  Theodore Sturgeon

  Philosophical, Writing, Humor

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• The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.

  Vernor Vinge

  Science, Creative, Fiction

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• Captain Crawford didn't like the idea of any kind of murder, but he went at it patiently and honestly and with none of the stupidity and bombast and rubber-hose techniques that Los Angeles crime fiction writers had led me to expect. I'd gotten the impression that unless a gifted amateur in love with the lady got himself almost beaten to a pulp and practically inside the lethal gas chamber before he unmasked the venal and brutalized constabulary, any innocent bystander they could get their hands on was a gone duck.

  Leslie Ford

  Bystanders, Hands, Ideas

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• Many fiction writers who put the science in dont get it right.

  Kathy Reichs

  Fiction

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• A science fiction writer should try to combine the intimately human with the grandly cosmic.

  Robert J. Sawyer

  Trying, Fiction, Should

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• I think fiction writers write what they do because no one else has written it and they want to read it.

  Alan Cheuse

  Writing, Thinking, Fiction

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