Fiction Quotes - Page 38

• When I'm reading for my own pleasure, I read things other than history or archival material. I read a lot of fiction. I'm very fond of mysteries.

  David McCullough

  Reading, Mystery, Pleasure

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• When I write fiction, I create characters whose views are not my own, and I allow them to be eloquent in defense of their, not my, views.

  Orson Scott Card

  Writing, Character, Views

  Actusf Interview, www.actusf.com. 2000.

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• I think that if you use something from you life in fiction, it metamorphosizes into something strange and different. Afterward it is hard to tell what actually was part of your life and what is part of the story of the fictional character.

  Marge Piercy

  Character, Thinking, Different

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

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• I think having a great range of experiences in my life had helped me as a writer, particularly a writer of fiction. I have known a great many different sorts of people in different situations, and I have a notion how very well of badly people can behave in times of stress or danger or violence.

  Marge Piercy

  Stress, Thinking, People

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

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• I did not always know I would be a writer. Until I had a room of my own, I did not write much at all - no more than any other child who read a lot of books. I began to write fiction and poetry when I first had a room that was truly my own with a door that shut and some measure, however fragile, of privacy.

  Marge Piercy

  Children, Book, Writing

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

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• The art of fiction is one of constant seduction. You must persuade the reader on page 1 to start reading - on page 50, or page 150 and yes, on page 850.

  Marge Piercy

  Art, Reading, Pages

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

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• My writing process is ritualized and monotonous, but there's no other way to get the job done. All other fiction writers I've met say the same thing.

  Douglas Coupland

  Jobs, Writing, Done

  Source: feathertale.com

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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

  Jay Gould, Essays, Essayists

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

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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, Groups, Different

  "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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• We don't really know how technology will affect narrative. That's the question. See, people used to say that the novel is going to die, but they would never say that movies will die with it, when in fact all forms depend on the narrative. I think if one of them fails, the others are going to fail as well. Maybe this will happen to both forms, and maybe movies will take a totally different direction with fiction.

  Don DeLillo

  Technology, Thinking, People

  Interviews with Don DeLillo, perival.com. December 15, 2016.

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• In fiction, I tend to write fairly realistic dialogue-not always, and it tends to vary
  from book to book. But in many books, there is a colloquialism of address. The characters will speak in a quite idiosyncratic way sometimes.

  Don DeLillo

  Book, Writing, Character

  Interview with Martha Lavey, www.steppenwolf.org.

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• There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.

  Don DeLillo

  Real, Thinking, Confusion

  "DeLillo's Novel Look at Oswald: Rescuing History From Confusion". Interview with Elizabeth Mehren, perival.com. August 12, 1988.

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• I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Thinking, Gears

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• You have to get inside the people you are writing about. You have to go below the surface. And that's to a very large degree what all writers are doing - they're trying to get below the surface. Whether it's in fiction or poetry or writing history and biography. Some people make that possible because they write wonderful letters and diaries. And you have to sort of go where the material is.

  David McCullough

  Writing, People, Trying

  Source: belmontvision.com

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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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• 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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• Comic books were telling me what life was about. This was how I kind of entered life, through fiction.

  Walter Mosley

  Book, Kind, Comic

  Source: bigthink.com

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• We're growing up with a very illiterate bunch of children who have somehow been taught that film is fact when, in fact, it's invention. Hopefully, an historical film will inspire people to go and read about the history but in the end it is a work of fiction and selection. As for the armour itself, no it wasn't particularly comfortable.

  Cate Blanchett

  Children, Growing Up, People

  "Elizabeth: The Golden Age - Cate Blanchett interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• That's the wonderful thing about drama and writing and fiction: it's this wonderful shared experience that we all have. We can see into each other's lives.

  Uma Thurman

  Drama, Writing, Wonderful

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• Corollary 1: The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere.

  Theodore Sturgeon

  Trash, Existence, Quantity

  Venture Science Fiction, March 1958.

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• Whatever alleged 'truth' is proven by results to be but an empty fiction, let it be unceremoniously flung into the outer darkness, among the dead gods, dead empires, dead philosophies, and other useless lumber and wreckage!

  Anton Szandor LaVey

  Philosophy, Darkness, Useless

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• It is good fiction, so largely ignored now, that brings us so much closer to the real facts.

  J. B. Priestley

  Real, Facts, Ignored

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• Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree.

  Wallace Stegner

  Lying, Mean, Stories

  Wallace Stegner (2007). “Crossing to Safety”, p.163, Modern Library

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• The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of the writer. This is completely understood about poetry or fiction, but it is too seldom realized about books of fact. And yet the impulse which drives a man to poetry will send another man into the tide pools and force him to try to report what he finds there.... It would be good to know the impulse truly, not to be confused by the 'services to science' platitudes or the other little mazes into which we entice our minds so that they will not know what we are doing.

  John Steinbeck

  Confused, Book, Reality

  John Steinbeck (1995). “The Log from the Sea of Cortez”, p.29, Penguin

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