Fiction Writers Quotes - Page 5

• my experience as a fiction writer tells me that the deeper I look into myself, the more universal is the experience I find there.

  Marion Dane Bauer

  Looks, Fiction, Deeper

  Marion Dane Bauer (1995). “A Writer's Story: From Life to Fiction”, p.14, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• We [fiction writers] are much more of a maze than we are a motorway. Things are always in flux, they're always in movement, they're always twisting back on each other. I think the straight line is such a lie.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Lying, Thinking, Mazes

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.

  Peter Straub

  Fiction, Want, Entity

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• You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.

  Lorrie Moore

  Fiction, Pay, Bills

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• I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers.

  Francine Prose

  Thinking, Fiction, Dramatic

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• ... the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Fiction, Mystery, Human Life

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.176, Macmillan

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• I am very much afraid that to the fiction writer the fact that we shall always have the poor with us is a source of satisfaction,for it means, essentially, that he will always be able to find someone like himself.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Mean, Fiction, Able

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

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• The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.

  John Updike

  Country, Fiction, United States

  1995 Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels, introduction.

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• I'm the only member of SFWA in Nebraska, but I don't pine away for the companionship of other science fiction writers. I [go] to very few conventions. I'm quite willing to be that eccentric who has a very odd job, quite happy to be the only science fiction writer in town.

  Robert Reed

  Jobs, Fiction, Nebraska

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• It's always great when you want scientific fact to get a really good science fiction writer to talk to you about it.

  Robin Williams

  Fiction, Want, Facts

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• It's interesting how many science fiction writers get going when they are very young. I was on a program with Greg Bear and he mentioned that he had gotten started writing when he was eight. And I began writing when I was 10. I think we're influenced by the stuff, we find it and we love it and we're influenced by it....I know I collected my first rejection slip when I was 13, and I went on collecting them for a long time after that.

  Octavia Butler

  Writing, Thinking, Eight

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• I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.

  Alan Lightman

  Fiction, Jay Gould, Essays

  Interview with Alex Burack, www.literarytraveler.com. May 4, 2007.

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• That's the fine balance of a fiction writer...to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.

  Alan Lightman

  Character, Giving, Balance

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

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• I think a colony in space will take much longer than sci fiction writers think. It costs $10,000 to put a pound of anything into near earth orbit. That is your weight in gold. It costs about $100,000 a pound to put you on the moon. And it costs $1,000,000 a pound to put you on Mars.

  Michio Kaku

  Thinking, Moon, Space

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• When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry. And the reason for that is because the fiction writers seemed to need to learn how to pay greater attention to language itself, to the way that language works.

  Edward Hirsch

  Writing, Creative, Taught

  Big Think interview, bigthink.com.

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• I'm repledging myself to human-scale values. As a fiction writer, the best data comes through the senses and is then processed through many revisions. We have to learn to be intelligent assessors of the data coming in to us and what it's doing to our mental process.

  George Saunders

  Intelligent, Data, Fiction

  Source: m.motherjones.com

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• My father taught me to love detective fiction writers such as Raymond Chandler. When I decided to have a hard-boiled detective series I did a lot of studying before I wrote the first book. I learned police procedure, the California criminal law, and many areas outside my expertise.

  Sue Grafton

  Father, Book, Law

  Interview with Elise Cooper, crimespreemag.com. August 21, 2015.

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• A lot of the despair we feel watching the news every day flows from our sense of helplessness, and as a fiction writer you get to control things, if only on the page. You get to run the show. You can right wrongs, bring departed loved ones back to life, even take vengeance on God, if that's your thing.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Running, Departed, Despair

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• That is many poets don't know how to tell a story and they don't have a sense of how to put things in order to tell a story and we thought the poets could learn from fiction writers something about developing a character over time who wasn't just you and also creating a narrative structure.

  Edward Hirsch

  Character, Order, Narrative Structure

  Big Think interview, bigthink.com.

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• I think the deepest thing is that many fiction writers tell stories but are not elegant writers. But, we're not writing journalism when we're making literature.

  Edward Hirsch

  Writing, Thinking, Fiction

  "Poets v. Prose Writers". Big Think interview, bigthink.com.

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• We're trying to make something that lasts in language and there's no question that many fiction writers began as poets and it's hard for me to think of any good fiction writers who don't also read poetry.

  Edward Hirsch

  Thinking, Trying, Fiction

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. February 4, 2010.

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• I'm sure there's an alternate universe where I got to become a pulpy science fiction writer.

  Neil Gaiman

  Fiction, Science Fiction, Universe

  Source: www.sffworld.com

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• As a fiction writer, that's been a preoccupation of mine: Can you really just close the door and leave the past back there behind you, or is the door going to blow open at some point?

  Dani Shapiro

  Blow, Past, Doors

  "Book Release: Devotion". Interview with Kari Wethington, www.elle.com. January 7, 2010.

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• Fiction writers learn about the development of metaphor, the use of rhythm, the way that language is compacted in order to express the feelings of - express their own feelings and the feelings of their characters.

  Edward Hirsch

  Character, Order, Feelings

  "Poets v. Prose Writers". Big Think interview, bigthink.com.

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• When I have a writing workshop, I like to have people that are anthropologists and people who are poking around in other fields, I like to have them all in the same workshop, and not worry about genre. 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. Or the comments you'll get from a filmmaker about your performance are going to be very different. My writing workshop is about mixing it up, cross-pollinating, not only in genres but in occupations.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Writing, Worry, People

  Source: quod.lib.umich.edu

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