Books Quote by Loretta H. Marion

“you can’t empathize, if you can’t or aren’t willing to put yourself into someone else’s place with all the compassion and insight you can…

— Joe Mynhardt

“Fiction that fails to engage an audience with the emotional intricacies of viable characters will, for many in that audience, simply alienate them with…

— Hal Duncan

“And yet, for a writer of fiction, part of the heart remains that of a stranger, for what we are trying to do is…

— Margaret Laurence

“What's remarkable about fiction is that it places you in the unusual position of having no trajectory. You stand aside, motives abandoned for the…

— Tom Rachman

“...no mind ever grew fat on a diet of novels. The pleasure which they occasionally offer is far too heavily paid for: they undermine…

— Elias Canetti

“I'd said to them that when we read fiction, we pour our own paricular store of emotions - say, the sense of loss we…

— Chandler Burr

I can't be alone among fiction writers in regarding the world, so much weirder than anything we could make up, as beating us at…

— Lionel Shriver

“...I've been ripped off, lied to, slandered, gossiped about slapped, falsely accused, and had my truths not believed. I've had my heart broken, had…

— Jessica Page Morrell

Fiction writers are strange beasts. They are, like all writers, observers first and foremost. Everything that happens to and around them is potential material…

— Terry Brooks

The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and…

— Tim O'Brien

There's something to be said for a likable character, but fiction has a way of upending our ordinary standards.

— Ben Dolnick

“Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we…

— C.S. Lewis