Fiction Writers Quotes - Page 9

• I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.

  Walter Mosley

  Thinking, Fiction, Interviews

  "Easy does it: Mosley brings back detective hero". Interview with Chris Talbott, www.sandiegouniontribune.com. December 7, 2011.

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• By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.

  Wallace Stegner

  Memories, Mind, Serious

  Wallace Stegner (2002). “On Teaching and Writing Fiction”, p.12, Penguin

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• If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.

  Bruce Sterling

  Wise, Play, Ideas

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• Science fiction [is] the kind of writing that prepares us for the necessary mutations brought about in society from an ever changing technological world and as a result. The mainstream hasn’t excluded SF; the mainstream has excluded itself. No one told Jules Verne he was a science fiction writer, but he invented the 20th century.

  Walter Mosley

  Writing, Mutation, Fiction

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• The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Examination, Fiction, Freak

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• I do not know who first invented the myth of sexual equality. But it is a myth willfully fostered and nourished by certain semi-scientists and other fiction writers. And it has done more, I suspect, to unsettle marital happiness than any other false doctrine of this myth-ridden age.

  Phyllis McGinley

  Age, Doctrine, Fiction

  Phyllis McGinley (1962). “The province of the heart”

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• Okay, this is Fran Lebowitz. She gave an interview once for the Paris Review about trying to write fiction and saying that fiction writers start talking about how characters are talking to them, and it's crazy, she's never had that. And I also thought, I'm never gonna be able to do this, because I didn't feel that for a really long time.

  Sloane Crosley

  Crazy, Character, Writing

  "Sloane Crosley Talks About Writing Her First Novel, The Clasp". Interview with A.M. Homes, www.vulture.com. May 31, 2015.

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• I think what people really want is fiction that in some tiny way makes their life more meaningful and makes the world seem like a richer place. The world is awfully short on joy and richness, and I think to some extent it’s the fiction writer’s job to salvage some of that and to give it to us in ways that we can believe in.

  Wells Tower

  Meaningful, Jobs, Believe

  "Wells Tower, Fiction Writer, Is Looking for Joy". Interview with Leon Neyfakh, observer.com. March 23, 2009.

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• If I couldn't be a fiction writer, I would be a roller coaster designer for theme parks

  Mike Wells

  Would Be, Fiction, Parks

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• Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Truth, Lying, Writing

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.8, Penguin

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• For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Fiction, Stories, World

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2004). “The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination”, p.207, Shambhala Publications

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• I was hardly fit for human society. Thus destiny shaped me to be a science fiction writer.

  Brian Aldiss

  Destiny, Fiction, Fit

  "The Twinkling of an Eye: My Life as an Englishman". Book by Brian Aldiss, 1998.

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• No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, dont confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Reading, Writing, Self

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• What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  People, Humanity, Fiction

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• I'm a novelist, I'm not an activist. I'm not a non-fiction writer, I'm not a journalist. I'm not a foodie, I'm not even really an animal person, or an environmentalist. I did the best I could with this, but it's not who I am.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Animal, Who I Am, Novelists

  Interview with Gregg LaGambina, www.avclub.com. November 17, 2009.

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• I'm not a science-fiction writer. I've only written one book that's science fiction, and that's Fahrenheit 451. All the others are fantasy.

  Ray Bradbury

  Book, Fiction, Fantasy

  Ray Bradbury, Steven L. Aggelis (2004). “Conversations with Ray Bradbury”, p.18, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Delaying and withholding tactics, red herrings, partial and doubtful outcomes are stock in trade for fiction writers, especially crime writers.

  Garry Disher

  Red, Fiction, Tactics

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• The training of a journalist, of working with words for thousands of hours, is extraordinarily useful for a fiction writer.

  Tom Rachman

  Training, Fiction, Hours

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• Rick Bass is one of a dwindling handful of American fiction writers still celebrating the importance of place, the natural world, and the struggle of a few brave souls to live and work respectfully in what's left of our western wilderness...The Lives of Rocks is his most lyrical and powerful book to date...a masterwork.

  Howard Frank Mosher

  Powerful, Struggle, Book

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• In a way, being a Mormon prepares you to deal with science fiction, because we live simultaneously in two very different cultures. The result is that we all know what it's like to be strangers in a strange land. It's not just a coincidence that there are so many effective Mormon science fiction writers. We don't regard being an alien as an alien experience. But it also means that we're not surprised when people don't understand what we're saying or what we think.

  Orson Scott Card

  Mean, Science, Technology

  "Orson Scott Card talks Ender's game in rare interview". Interview with Shane Snow, www.wired.com. October 31, 2013.

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• A favorite science fiction writer of mine is William Faulkner! It was an idea that came to me once, years ago, and I've never quite been able to shake it. This is facetious, on one level at least. There are telepaths in As I Lay Dying. But I think the most compelling thing for me is there are moments with him where I just feel these are not humans talking to each other. These are some hyper-intelligent, yet-to-be-born organisms. The way they look at the past without having any loss of knowledge – everything that ever happened is still here.

  Robert Reed

  Loss, Thinking, Intelligent

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• Perhaps the rediscovery of our humanity, and the potential of the human spirit which we have read about in legends of older civilizations, or in accounts of solitary mystics, or in tales of science fiction writers - perhaps this will constitute the true revolution of the future. The new frontier lies not beyond the planets but within each one of us.

  Pierre Trudeau

  Lying, Civilization, Humanity

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• If asked to list my ten favorite American fiction writers, Gail Godwin would be among them. In this, her latest . . . she evokes in a short book the long married life of two artists. Evenings at Five is a strong tale of love-after-death.

  Ned Rorem

  Strong, Book, Artist

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• I don't think I'm more of a screenwriter than I am a fiction writer. I'm more of a reader than a film-watcher, so I imagine that I'm not approaching fiction or films in a particularly cinematic way.

  Miranda July

  Thinking, Fiction, Way

  Interview with Ross Simonini, www.believermag.com. 2015.

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• I was a big fan of a writer named Jack Vance, a science fiction writer. He always wrote about these guys who were either going down a river in a strange world or would be in this one land where people acted really strange, and he'd have these interactions with them that were strange - he'd usually get run out of town or something. Then he'd end up in the next town over where the rules were totally different. And I love this stuff.

  Bela Fleck

  Running, Land, Rivers

  Source: therumpus.net

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