Being Quote by Steven Erikson

“The art of writing tales consists in an ability to draw the rest of life from the little one has understood of it; but…

— Italo Calvino

We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to…

— Orson Scott Card

I firmly believe as an author you have to go out in life and hear the stories of people. In pubs in the UK…

— Charles Todd

Actually, the true story of a person's life can never be written. It is beyond the power of literature. The full tale of any…

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes…

— Mary Augusta Ward

Novels are one of the few remaining areas of narrative storytelling where one person does almost all of the creative heavy lifting.

— Charles Stross

I think there is something about a story that is enduring. Stories take on a life of their own.

— Max Lucado

Many people go into the wilderness to experience it, and if they experience it in comfort, there's very little in a literary sense for…

— Tim Cahill

Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.

— Nadine Gordimer

Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.

— Robert McKee

Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.

— Jonathan Franzen

“[I]n adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness. Adult readers who…

— Philip Pullman