Fiction Writing Quotes

• Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

  Robert Morgan

  Powerful, Writing, Southern

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• Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.

  Michael Crichton

  Book, Writing, Done

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Reading, Book, Writing

  "The Figure a Poem Makes". Book by Ernest Hemingway, 1939.

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• Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

  Matthew Arnold

  Writing, Secret, Famous Writers

  Quoted in G.W. E. Russell, Collections and Recollections (1898)

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• The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

  Tom Clancy

  Life, Witty, Truth

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.

  Harlan Ellison

  Morning, Writing, Thinking

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• Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.

  Mark Twain

  Truth, Science, Fiction

  Following the Equator ch. 15, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar" (1897) See Byron 33; Chesterton 6

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  I love deadlines. I like the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

  Douglas Adams

  Love, Inspirational, Hilarious

  "The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time (Dirk Gently, Book 3)". Book by Douglas Adams, 2002.

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• It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

  William Faulkner

  Moving, Writing, Character

  William Faulkner, Joseph L. Fant, Robert Paul Ashley (1964). “Faulkner at West Point”, p.101, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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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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• Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Writing, Creativity, People

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• I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Funny Life, Writing, Sound

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• If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Writing, Character, Passion

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• Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

  Ivana Trump

  Funny, Stupid, Inspiration

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• Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Life, Being Alone, Writing

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• Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.

  Harlan Ellison

  Writing, Intelligent, Praise

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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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• Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

  J. P. Donleavy

  Writing, Worst Moments, Writing Fiction

  Quoted in Playboy, May 1979

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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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• When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.

  Raymond Chandler

  Writing, Gun, Men

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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

  James Frey

  Writing, Conflict, Dramatic

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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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• The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

  Jim Rohn

  Inspirational, Truth, Writing

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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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