Quotes About Fiction writers

People have always heard voices. Sometimes they're called shamans, sometimes they're called mad, and sometimes they're called fiction writers. I always feel lucky that I live in a culture where fiction writing is legal and not seen as pathology.

Most fiction writers are driven to find their own 'voice,' but I am more interested in the voices of others.

I go to readings by fiction writers like Alice Walker, and I'm envious of the level of attention they generate.

religions were the first great inventions of the fiction writers. A convincing representation and a plausible explanation of the world for understandably confused minds. A beautiful, shapely story containing hard, exact lies.

I give this book 5 Stars and highly recommend it to all fiction, nonfiction, and poetry writers, aspiring writers, bloggers or journalists.

Much to my surprise, there's a sense for people in the cable industry that fiction writers might actually be good at script writing. You can write dialogue!

As a writer one doesn't belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn't belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.

Fiction writers tend to err either making people more than they are or less than they are. I'd rather err on the side of the former.

Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don't think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously.

That's what fiction writers do: create characters and do terrible things to them for the entertainment of others. If they feel guilty enough, they write happy endings.

I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don't. When I first started writing, I just started writing a novel. It's a hard way to learn to write. I don't recommend it to my students, but it just happens that way for some of us.

Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.

This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don't understand very much about what they do -- not why it works when it's good, not why it doesn't when it's bad. I figured the shorter the book, the less bullshit. Stephen King, On Writing

The novelist's obligation to remake the sensuous texture of a vanished world is also the historian's. The strongest fiction writers often do deep research to make the thought and utterances of lost time credible.

I did go to an MFA program, at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. For me, it worked perfectly. It was a small program. They only take five fiction writers a year, and they fund all of us - you don't go into debt to get an MFA. It's not like getting an MBA - you're not going to buy yourself out.

Delaying and withholding tactics, red herrings, partial and doubtful outcomes are stock in trade for fiction writers, especially crime writers.

The term sci-fi, which most science fiction writers loathe, I will reserve for those motion pictures that claim to be science fiction but are actually based on comic strips. Or worse.

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

We fiction writers are a brazen lot, are we not? For we, in our passion, embrace just enough truth to consecrate our delicately contrived lies.

I read somewhere once that in the 1960s, fiction writers were troubled by the notion that life was becoming stranger and more sensational than made-up stories could ever hope to be. Our new problem - more profound, I think - is that life no longer resembles a story. Events intersect but don't progress. People interact but don't make contact.

The sound of a feeding was impossible to ignore. Cross heard the smack of teeth, and sucking sounds so loud he swore they came from there in the room. He heard pained moans and animal barks. It amused him to think that once, so very long ago, these creatures had been painted as romantics by fiction writers. They were animals, pure and simple, vicious of heart, evil of spirit, malign in their sole drive to wipe humanity out.

Historians turning their hands to fiction are all the rage. Since Alison Weir led the way in 2006, an ever-growing number of established non-fiction writers - Giles Milton, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Harry Sidebottom, Patrick Bishop, Ian Mortimer and myself included - have written historical novels.

Where is the B. who didn't at all like speculative fiction writers, with the exception of Margaret Atwood and the Jewish triumvirs: Asimov, Ellison, and Tidhar?" "Really?" I say. "Tidhar? Jesus Christ." "Yes," she screams. "Tidhar! You loved Tidhar!

Good fiction writers have an instinctive understanding of human nature. That's what makes stories and characters captivating. Good spiritual writers share what they sincerely practice themselves.