Any Quote by Richard Russo

Failure has been my best friend as a writer. It tests you, to see if you have what it takes to see it through.

— Markus Zusak

Fiction always reveals a lot about the person who is writing it. That's the scary thing. Not in a straightforward autobiographical sense. But the…

— Katie Kitamura

For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures.

— Mary Augusta Ward

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

— William Faulkner

The truth, or success, of any writer's story lies partly in its specificity and its emotional honesty.

— Gail Caldwell

At least I hope - that the fiction I've written so far has flaws but has mostly been successful.

— William T. Vollmann

“Mistakes in a work of fiction by a writer are new discoveries by the reader, that create a new ending for the story.”

— kambiz mostofizadeh

you can tell the deepest truths with the lies of fiction

— Isabel Allende

If you write a hundred short stories and they're all bad, that doesn't mean you've failed. You fail only if you stop writing.

— Ray Bradbury

The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn't fail.

— Alice Munro

“in the deepest of failure lies success”

— Kumbirai Dhliwayo

Most contemporary fiction sucks. It's intellectually dishonest, often morally dishonest. It's cheap and easy. It pretends to be deep but is really quite shallow.

— Dale Peck