Fiction Writing Quotes - Page 3

• 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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• Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything.

  Philip K. Dick

  Sorry, Writing, Fiction

  Philip K. Dick (1985). “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon”, Doubleday Books

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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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• Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil-but there is no way around them.

  Isaac Asimov

  Writing, Rejection, Soul

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• If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Writing, Technology, Fiction

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.169, Grove Press

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• 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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• My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

  Anton Chekhov

  Lying, Writing, Stories

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

  Lucy Poate Stebbins

  Lying, Writing, Roots

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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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• 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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• 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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• I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.

  Alain de Botton

  Writing, Trying, Attention

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• In fiction writing, I would say there are several different strands that have been woven through my own writing, and each influenced by a different group of writers.

  Alan Lightman

  Writing, Fiction, Groups

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

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• Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.

  Alan Lightman

  Character, Writing, Thinking

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

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• In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully. You can't let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.

  Alan Lightman

  Writing, Character, Ideas

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

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• When you're writing a book that is going to be a narrative with characters and events, you're walking very close to fiction, since you're using some of the methods of fiction writing. You're lying, but some of the details may well come from your general recollection rather than from the particular scene. In the end it comes down to the readers. If they believe you, you're OK. A memoirist is really like any other con man; if he's convincing, he's home. If he isn't, it doesn't really matter whether it happened, he hasn't succeeded in making it feel convincing.

  Samuel Hynes

  Lying, Believe, Book

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• Fiction writing is a strange business when you think about it. You sit down and weave a network of lies to explore deeper truths.

  Wally Lamb

  Lying, Writing, Thinking

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• My first and biggest love was always fiction writing. But it is a very lonely pastime.

  Etgar Keret

  Lonely, Writing, Fiction

  "Suddenly: An Interview With Etgar Keret". Interview with Courtney Becks, www.raintaxi.com.

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• Never believe that the fiction writing life makes sense.... It's insanity by definition.

  Jo Beverley

  Believe, Writing, Insanity

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• The professions of novelist and journalist are very separate. As a novelist, you are ultimately working for yourself. Yes, you need the approval of a publisher and an audience, but what is valued in fiction writing - style, individual voice, insight - is scorned by the editor who is combing through your newspaper article.

  Jon Weisman

  Writing, Editors, Voice

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Fiction and screenwriting blend for me. I feel like being a TV writer/screenwriter has definitely made my fiction writing better, although I have less time to do it.

  Nick Antosca

  Writing, Fiction, Tvs

  Source: therumpus.net

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• What you create when you're teaching fiction writing is a kind of literary salon, not a social club or a mutual admiration society, not a debating society, not a repair shop, not a fight club or a soap box. It's a place to have a conversation about a story.

  John Dufresne

  Teaching, Writing, Fighting

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The first time I took a fiction writing class was sophomore year. And I just found myself taking that extremely seriously, in a way that I didn't take anything else seriously. So I guess that was the start of it.

  John Brandon

  Writing, Years, Class

  Source: therumpus.net

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• It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.

  Alexander Chee

  Spiritual, Writing, Thinking

  "Go Forth (Vol. 41)". Interview with Kristen Evans, logger.believermag.com. February 26, 2016.

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