Fact is often stranger than fiction because most writers of fiction try to make their stories plausible. — Richard Posner
Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything. — Ivana Trump
That's what a writer does; they make things up and that makes for good reading. — Debbie Reynolds
Science fiction readers probably have the gene for novelty, and seem to enjoy a cascade of invention as much as a writer enjoys providing one. — Walter Jon Williams
Writers are magpies, and we collect details about people and we use them for fictional characters. — Caroline Leavitt
Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism. — Neil Gaiman
History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders. — Edna O'Brien
The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories — Diane Arbus
I think that successful writers somehow capture truths that resonate with readers. — Steven Gundry
Writers perform an extremely important role: they make others dream, those who are unable to dream for themselves. And everyone needs to dream. Could there be any more important job in life than that? — Félix J. Palma
Fiction is the truth inside the lie. — Stephen King
Short Fiction Writers Quotes
Those who write are writers. Those who wait are waiters. — A. Lee Martinez
Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications. — Raymond Carver
Writers build castles in the air, the reader lives inside, and the publisher inns the rent. — Maxim Gorky
It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer. — E. O. Wilson
The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction. — Tom Wolfe
Top 10 Fiction Writers Quotes
The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers — Jacques Barzun
Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself. — Harlan Ellison
I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don't get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists. — Kathy Acker
Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. — Barbara Kingsolver
It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly. — C. J. Cherryh
The essence of drama is that man cannot walk away from the consequences of his own deeds. — Harold Hayes
The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home. — John Y. Campbell
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying. — Anton Chekhov
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write. — W. Somerset Maugham
The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with. — William Faulkner
Fiction Writers Image Quotes
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
Writing Quotes
Architecture is like writing. You have to edit it over and over so it looks effortless — Zaha Hadid
Build your own pyramids, write your own hieroglyphs. — Kendrick Lamar
Write your Sad times in Sand,
Write your Good times in Stone. — George Bernard Shaw
Before you speak, listen. Before you write, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you invest, investigate. Before you criticize, wait. Before you pray, forgive. Before you quit, try. Before you retire, save. Before you die, give. — William Arthur Ward
We need to have music that contributes to the well-being of the spirit. Music that cradles people's lives and makes things a little easier. That's what I try to do, and what I want to do. You don't want to close the door on hope. — Merle Haggard
As a writer you ask yourself to dream while aware.
Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. — Franz Kafka
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. — Alvin Toffler
Do it because it's in your heart. Not because you want something in return. Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for. — Socrates
The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done. — Jean Piaget
Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are. — John Wooden
Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way. — Martin Luther King
Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage. — Winston Churchill
If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would get written at all. It might be better to ask yourself 'Why?”'afterwards than before There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you. — Zora Neale Hurston
A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it. — Edgar Allan Poe
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best. — Linwood Barclay
Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better. — V. S. Pritchett
Pure poetry in motion. A swift-moving, heartfelt tale of love and loss, two stories intersecting-an d connecting-by magic. Michelle Baker is a born poet, and a born writer. The Canoe is just the start of what I hope to be a long idyllic journey through the love and soul of the human heart. — Trent Zelazny
A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity
Don't mistake a good setup for a satisfying conclusion - many beginning writers end their stories when the real story is just ready to begin. — Stanley Schmidt
For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out. — Eudora Welty
I love the necessary ambiguity of short stories - there simply isn't time to render every detail, so much of the story that orbits the literal prose must happen in the reader's imagination. Who knows, maybe the dwindling attention spans means a lucrative future for short story writers. — Matthew Healy
People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it. — Harlan Ellison
Fiction Novels Quotes
My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky. — Alan Moore
I'm working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas. — Louise Brown
Oh, I’m nerdy about science fiction and fantasy and graphic novels and reading, and I’m nerdy about board games. My favorite board game is a board game I’m working on right now. It’s a game of Napoleonic era naval warfare, and it’s going to be fun. — Billy Campbell
I'm a writer. Therefore. I am not sane.
Expand the definition of 'reading' to include non-fiction, humor, graphic novels, magazines, action adventure, and, yes, even websites. It's the pleasure of reading that counts; the focus will naturally broaden. A boy won't read shark books forever. — Jon Scieszka
Babylon 5 is probably the biggest, most ambitious television science fiction series ever made. It's one big novel told over five years with 110 different stories told within it. — Bill Mumy
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 have an author assure us that it means something. — Orson Scott Card
The universe wrote fiction is us. Its called Fear.
If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor. — Edgar Rice Burroughs
Good fiction must be entertaining- but what makes fiction special- and True- is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message. — Jerry B. Jenkins
I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within. — Gustave Flaubert
The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them. — Vladimir Nabokov
I can’t write five words but that I change seven. — Dorothy Parker
If you're going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow. — Louis L'Amour
The number one thing I am earnestly attracted to is intelligence. Writers are thus the pinnacle of intelligence. While actors are great and awesome, writers literally create new worlds from scratch. What is sexier than that? Personally, I don't know why every person out there isn't dating a writer. — Rachel Bloom
writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers. — Charles Bukowski
Writing is the flip side of sex - it's good only when it's over. — Hunter S. Thompson
As a writer, it's disheartening to write books that you pour your soul into and not have them distributed widely enough to find their audience. — Sylvia Day
The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book. — Mickey Spillane
I don't like political poetry, and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers. — Diane Wakoski
We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that. — Kevin J. Anderson
But the sensibility of the writer, whether fiction or poetry, comes from paying attention. I tell my students that writing doesn't begin when you sit down to write. It's a way of being in the world, and the essence of it is paying attention. — Julia Alvarez
If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless. — Bruce Sterling
Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer. — Barbara Kingsolver
I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly. — Edgar Rice Burroughs
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. — Ernest Hemingway
Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret. — Matthew Arnold
If you start with a bang, you won't end with a whimper. — T. S. Eliot
I tell my students there is such a thing as 'writer's block,' and they should respect it. You shouldn't write through it. It's blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven't got it right now. — Toni Morrison
Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about. — Alice Munro
Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people. — Roald Dahl
There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies. — Simone Weil
Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort is to remove that distinction. The writer is the midwife of understanding. It's very important for me to tell politics like a story, to make it real. — Arundhati Roy
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good. — William Faulkner
Even though my songs may sound very personal, to me most of them are fiction. It is a great way for me to be able to live a fantasy life as a writer because I get to be someone else, someplace else for three and a half minutes, just like the listener. — Nanci Griffith
There is always a certain leap of faith that editors have made with their nonfiction writers. If the trust is broken, things can get very embarrassing for the writers and the publisher. — A. Scott Berg
Scandinavian crime fiction has become a great success all across the world and rightfully so. Sjowall and Wahloo ushered in a whole generation of Swedish crime writers, many of whom are now available in English. — Camilla Lackberg
Many Scandinavian writers who had made their name in literary fiction felt they wanted to have a go at the crime novel to show they could compete with the best. If Salman Rushdie had been Norwegian, he would definitely have written at least one thriller. — Jo Nesbo
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any. — Orson Scott Card
Anyone watching '30 Rock' always knew Tina Fey was playing a fictionalized version of herself, a workaholic comedy writer who also plays one on TV. She's the boss; Liz Lemon just works here. — Rob Sheffield
I am an old-fashioned storyteller. I try to make people laugh and cry. A fiction writer's duty is to entertain. If you can sneak in something profound or symbolic, so much the better. — W. P. Kinsella
Fiction is about stuff that's screwed up. — Nancy Kress
Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created - nothing. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Memoirists, unlike fiction writers, do not really want to 'tell a story.' They want to tell it all - the all of personal experience, of consciousness itself. That includes a story, but also the whole expanding universe of sensation and thought ... Memoirists wish to tell their mind. Not their story. — Patricia Hampl
A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer. — Joseph Conrad
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction. — William Faulkner
Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home. — John W. Campbell
Wesley Stace has always been the only genuinely gifted fiction writer who also happens to be a rock star, but Wonderkid is the book he was born to write. And if you prefer your novels brazen, poignant and hilarious, as I do, you were born to read it. Like a great show, this will stay with you long after the last cymbal crash and power strum. — Sam Lipsyte
In Conclusion
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