Confined Quote by Truman Capote

“Novelists are a special breed. They cannot genuinely trust anything they have not seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands…

— Haruki Murakami

“A writer’s brain is full of little gifts, like a piñata at a birthday party. It’s also full of demons, like a piñata at…

— Colin Nissan

Some acts of worldbuilding in fiction instantiate a milieu that is so culturally odd and exotic, so displaced from the audience's consensus reality in…

— Paul Di Filippo

Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will…

— Andrew O'Hagan

You see, the contemporary writer must write through his intimations of unease, while trying to elucidate them.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

I think most fiction focuses on uncomfortable settings because that's interesting.

— N. K. Jemisin

It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self- revelations.

— C. S. Lewis

That's the thing about fiction writers: what seems alarming or particular or perverse about them is simply the shape of their brain - they…

— Zadie Smith

“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

“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

Novels are so interior and idiosyncratic and such a solitary process.

— Megan Abbott

It's funny to think about the uncanny reflexively, as an author who is perhaps gradually becoming aware of my own hidden secrets. Accessing that…

— Karen Russell