Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
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.
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.
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.
Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.
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.
If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.
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.
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.
The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.
Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day.
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.
It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.
A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.
Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything.
or simply:
