Being Quote by Orhan Pamuk

Writing fiction is an act of imaginative empathy.

— Andrew Sean Greer

“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 is an act of willfulness, a deliberate effort to reconcile, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing short of reality itself. Even among the most…

— Jhumpa Lahiri

I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.

— Tom Stoppard

I think part of what I like about being a fiction writer is that I can inhabit something that's beyond the limits of my…

— Jenny Offill

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

— Phil Klay

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

— Marilynne Robinson

...writing fiction...is no job for intellectual cowards.

— Stephen King

When you're writing fiction, you're in every character 'cause you can't help it.

— Marcia Clark

I think a fairly common behavior among fiction writers is that they want to help. They're generally charitable people. They're interested in the world.…

— Joshua Ferris

“An author has to fit into the skin of her characters, to imagine being trapped by unfortunate and sometimes violent circumstances she herself has…

— Loretta H. Marion

My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own.

— Tahar Ben Jelloun