Controlled Quote by George Saunders

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

— Clive James

The beauty of prose fiction that I see is simply that in order to create something you need only pay attention to personal exigency.

— James Kelman

Our human impulse is to control everything, but fiction seems to me to be about allowing an element of mystery into the text.

— Lauren Groff

I had originally been looking at writing, including fiction.

— Ben Rhodes

I'm not reading what I write when I wrote. It's an unconscious outpouring that's a mess, and it's many, many steps away from anything…

— Jennifer Egan

Fiction writing is just an excuse to go discover interesting things.

— Anthony Doerr

With fiction, there’s no reason why everything you write shouldn’t be amazing. Nobody’s stopping you from making up better stuff.

— Wells Tower

Even when it comes to writing fiction, how do you encompass all this stuff that's right on the tip of your tongue? You have…

— Paul Beatty

Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.

— Terence McKenna

There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process.

— Joy Williams

I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.

— Colm Toibin

Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.

— Jonathan Safran Foer