Writing fiction Quotes · Page 4

Writing fiction means putting a lot of what you believe about the world at risk, because you have to follow your characters.

— Phil Klay

Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.

— Gore Vidal

There's a satisfaction I get from writing fiction that I will never get from screenwriting.

— Jonathan Tropper

Writing a novel is like heading out over the open sea in a small boat. It helps, if you have a plan…

— John Gardner

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

— William Faulkner

Writing fiction is a good way to inhabit other minds, if not other lives.

— Sheila Heti

The one thing they didn't tell you at Iowa is how hard it is to make a living writing fiction and poetry.

— Peter Heller

I've always felt that the basic unit of writing fiction is the sentence, and the basic unit of the screenplay is the…

— Matthew Specktor

“I'm always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality…

— Flannery O'Connor

I'm still an old-school reporter at heart. Writing fiction satisfies my journalistic need to hear and relay the testimony of everyday people…

— Karen Traviss

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel,…

— Joan Didion

When I read any book, if it's really good I get lost in the writing whether it's fiction or non-fiction. I'm in…

— Jeff Feuerzeig

Writing grew out of the pleasure of escape. My novels are very much outside of my personal experience. That is why I…

— Danielle Trussoni

My personality has two sides: a very social side and a reclusive side. I love writing fiction, although I can't imagine ever…

— John Searles

I was an outsider, never quite part of what was going on, always looking in. It turned out to be great preparation…

— Hallie Ephron

“I am not ultimately interested in writing fiction. I can't make things up. Or rather, I can only make things up about…

— Alison Bechdel

I guess it must be a time-of-life thing, looking back and trying to make some sense of who I am and where…

— Tim Winton

“Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day.…

— Will Self

“Writing fiction is, in many ways, like a religion. It is a daily practice, a way of life, a set of rituals,…

— Anonymous

Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then…

— Neil Gaiman

I have a process that I seem to always, to some degree, as a writer, adhere to, but I certainly have never…

— John Irving

The process of writing fiction is totally unconscious. It comes from what you are learning, as you live, from within. For me,…

— Nadine Gordimer

In college, I'd gone abroad to get away from a campus where I felt I didn't fit in. And I started writing…

— Kim Brooks

“They know a million tricks, those novelists. Take Doctor Goebbels; that's how he started out, writing fiction. Appeals to the base lusts…

— Philip K. Dick

When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately.

— Anonymous

I much prefer writing fiction. History books, for me, are very hard work, very serious.

— Simon Sebag Montefiore

“Your passion as an artist is a magnet that draws you at all times, but if you don’t follow, it will suffocate…

— Pawan Mishra

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

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

It's the feeling of being lifted out of my life into another world that is the thrill of writing fiction.

— Jennifer Egan

My writing, it's mostly fiction, but I want it to feel intimate and real.

— Martine Syms

The triumph of writing fiction is that by doing so, writers can build a more ideal world in themselves.

— Lauren Groff

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

— John Updike

Writing fiction is brilliant because you can totally exaggerate everything and not have to worry about legal issues.

— Coleen Nolan

I sometimes get asked if I think about film stuff while I'm writing fiction, and the answer is, of course not.

— Matthew Specktor

One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.

— Marilynne Robinson

I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself and I get to make up the rules of the world that…

— Roxane Gay

“Writing fiction feels like an adventurous act, nudging aside reality a word at a time.”

— James Van Pelt

I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.

— Peter Straub

Writing fiction is ... an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.

— Rose Wilder Lane

I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn't write again until I was a…

— Janet Fitch