Asked Quote by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The secret of successful fiction is a continual slight novelty.

— Edmund Gosse

“To be a successful fiction writer you have to write well, write a lot … and let ‘em know you’ve written it! Then rinse…

— Gerard de Marigny

Ironically, in today's marketplace successful nonfiction has to be unbelievable, while successful fiction must be believable.

— Jerry B. Jenkins

'No Sweetness Here' is the kind of old-fashioned social realism I have always been drawn to in fiction, and it does what I think…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Whenever I write lyrics and an Americanism slips in, I always cut it straight out. I can't use the word 'babe,' for instance. It…

— Gilbert O'Sullivan

A short story collection can be as exciting as a novel. It is a real complete experience, like when you listen to a real…

— David Means

“Novelists congratulate themselves on their creation of this kind of “character” or that kind of “character,” and readers pretend to talk knowingly about “character,”…

— Sōseki Natsume

You can't have a novel without real, believable people, and once you get into either too theoretical a novel or too philosophical a novel,…

— Julian Barnes

Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would…

— Elizabeth Bowen

Simply put, you can read a story in a single sitting and hold it all in your mind. You can experience all of its…

— Adam Ross

“My dear, you will be woefully disappointed if in my story you expect any thing like a novel. I once heard a general say,…

— Maria Edgeworth

“Writing a novel is like making soup. The base is a broth we make up wholesale—for instance, I have one child, not five, and…

— Laurie Frankel