Fiction Writers Quotes - Page 3

• The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

  Stephen King

  Movie, Writing, Sisterhood

  FaceBook post by Stephen King from Feb 06, 2013

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• Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

  Philip K. Dick

  Sorry, Writing, Fiction

  Philip K. Dick (1985). “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon”, Doubleday Books

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• The road to hell is paved with leeks and potatoes

  Julie Powell

  Writing, Sisterhood, Skulls

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• Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

  Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

  Writing, Judging, Down And

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• 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

  Writing, Past, Ideas

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• If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.

  Edgar Rice Burroughs

  Writing, Odds, Stories

  "King of the Jungle" by John J. Miller, reason.com. August/September 1999.

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• Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day.

  Orson Scott Card

  Writing, Past, Ideas

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• Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

  J. P. Donleavy

  Writing, Worst Moments, Writing Fiction

  Quoted in Playboy, May 1979

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• Easy reading is damn hard writing.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Powerful, Reading, Writing

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• The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

  Philip Roth

  Work, Writing, Sisterhood

  1979 In the NewYorkTimes Book Review,15 Jul.

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• The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

  Samuel Johnson

  Wisdom, Writing, Procrastination

  Statement on April 14, 1775. "Life of Samuel Johnson". Book by James Boswell. Volume II, 1791.

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  Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Writing, Night, Journey

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• Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

  Anton Chekhov

  Inspirational, Writing, Moon

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• No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Reading, Book, Writing

  "The Figure a Poem Makes". Book by Ernest Hemingway, 1939.

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• It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.

  C. J. Cherryh

  Writing, Long, Garbage

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  I love deadlines. I like the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

  Douglas Adams

  Love, Inspirational, Hilarious

  "The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time (Dirk Gently, Book 3)". Book by Douglas Adams, 2002.

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• Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything.

  Philip K. Dick

  Sorry, Writing, Fiction

  Philip K. Dick (1985). “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon”, Doubleday Books

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• Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Writing, Keys, Story Writers

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• The essence of drama is that man cannot walk away from the consequences of his own deeds.

  Harold Hayes

  Drama, Writing, Men

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• 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.

  Stephen King

  Book, Writing, Bullshit

  Stephen King (2000). “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

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• It's probably a form of childish curiosity that keeps me going as a fiction writer. I ... want to open everybody's bureau drawers and see what they keep in there. I'm nosy.

  Margaret Atwood

  Curiosity, Fiction, Want

  Margaret Atwood (1990). “Margaret Atwood: Conversations”, Princeton, N.J. : Ontario Review Press

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• As a fiction writer you train yourself to think about situations subjectively. I don't really care for narratives that are just A, B, C, D, and then E. I like the aura that fiction has, how it can conjure up dream imagery. It's a sort of emotional speculation that you can shape and work with.

  Oscar Hijuelos

  Dream, Emotional, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think it is our job, as writers, to be epic. Epic and tiny at the same time. If you're going to be a fiction writer, why not take on something that means something. In doing this, you must understand that within that epic structure it is the tiny story that is possibly more important.

  Colum McCann

  Jobs, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• If I write a paragraph and I don't get a certain lift from it, if I don't feel connected to it emotionally, then it's dead to me. When I'm reading other fiction writers, if I don't get any emotional investment from the writer, if it's just intellectual or clever - you know, most writing that passes as deep is just clever - I don't feel any connection.

  Oscar Hijuelos

  Clever, Reading, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I was looking at a lot of experimental writers, and I was very intrigued by short-short fiction, writers who would write little things, what I call buttons now, little vignettes.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Writing, Buttons, Fiction

  "Talking in Our Pajamas". Interview with Ruth Behar, quod.lib.umich.edu. Summer, 2008.

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