Fiction Writing Quotes - Page 3

• Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.

  Orson Scott Card

  Writing, Past, Ideas

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• If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.

  Edgar Rice Burroughs

  Writing, Odds, Stories

  "King of the Jungle" by John J. Miller, reason.com. August/September 1999.

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• A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.

  Joseph Conrad

  Writing, Men, Fellow Man

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• The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.

  John Y. Campbell

  Home, Writing, Simple

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• The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.

  William Faulkner

  Dream, Writing, Artist

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• Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

  Anton Chekhov

  Inspirational, Writing, Moon

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• I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.

  Edgar Rice Burroughs

  Writing, Successful, Interesting

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• People love gossip because it's slightly removed from actuality. It's a very literary thing... You can hear a great story, and it turns out that it's largely not true. Fiction writing is like gossip. It's not malicious gossip, but it's gossip.

  Lorrie Moore

  Writing, Gossip, People

  FaceBook post by Lorrie Moore from Nov 11, 2011

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• Once you're imagining being the main character, and you're having the conversations and actually being there, the magic in fiction writing takes over.

  Will Hobbs

  Writing, Character, Magic

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• The desire to confess ... lies at the root of most fiction writing.

  Lucy Poate Stebbins

  Lying, Writing, Roots

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• From my years of teaching creative writing, I know that new writers take the setting for granted, as simply a place to set the action, but setting is a vital element in fiction writing and deserves serious treatment.

  Garry Disher

  Teaching, Writing, Years

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• Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

  Amy Waldman

  Reading, Writing, Character

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• First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.

  Kathy Acker

  Writing, Thinking, Magic

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• Fiction writing feels more honest to me.

  David James Duncan

  Writing, Fiction, Honest

  David James Duncan (2007). “God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right”, p.189, Triad Institute, Inc.

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• A lot of crime fiction writing is also lazy. Personality is supposed to be shown by the protagonists taste in music, or were told that the hero looks like the young Cary Grant. Film is the medium these writers are looking for.

  Peter Temple

  Hero, Writing, Personality

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• This sounds like a cliche, but I always wanted to write. After college, I did some writing and realized very quickly that it's hard to make a living as a writer. At that point, I was more interested in fiction writing.

  Hooman Majd

  Writing, College, Sound

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• Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.

  James Rollins

  Real, Writing, Son

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• I took two fiction-writing courses in college and majored in literature. I felt that I had a knack though I wouldn't go so far as to call it a talent. But it scared me. I felt it was a childish thing wanting to write and that I would forget about it eventually.

  Ben Fountain

  Writing, College, Two

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• My work is very eclectic. I write books that range from writing fiction, writing fable where I am very directly trying to imagine alternate worlds, to writing about [Buckminster] Fuller who was the ultimate world man creating all sorts of alternate worlds and believing that they were imminent to my own work of - for instance, a project that I've been working on for some year and a half, two years now that continues to evolve has been what I call Deep Time Photography.

  Jonathon Keats

  Photography, Believe, Book

  Source: therumpus.net

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• For me, writing plays is far more an act of the mind than of the emotions. It's a very different kind of impulse than fiction writing.

  Jim Grimsley

  Writing, Play, Mind

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• When I was in high school and college, my other real focus was, actually, fiction writing. So in college, I had done all these seminars with these various writers-in-residence.

  Lily Rabe

  Real, Writing, School

  "Lily Rabe’s Master Class". Interview with Alexandria Symonds, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 15, 2011.

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• Fiction writing is a twenty-four-hou r-a-day occupation. You never leave your work behind. It is always with you, and to some extent, you are always thinking about it. You don't take your work home; your work never leaves home. It lives inside you. It resides and grows and comes alive in your mind.

  Terry Brooks

  Home, Writing, Thinking

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• I teach a non-fiction writing class at New York University, and one of my great pleasures is deciding on the syllabus.

  Susan Orlean

  New York, Writing, Class

  "An Education" by Susan Orlean, www.newyorker.com. March 15, 2011.

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• Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.

  Paul Theroux

  Book, Reading, Writing

  "Fiction in the Age of E-Books". "The Atlantic" Interview, www.theatlantic.com. 2010.

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• You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing- your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.

  David Foster Wallace

  Writing, Vanity, Fiction

  David Foster Wallace (2014). “The David Foster Wallace Reader”, Hachette UK

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