Fiction Writers Quotes - Page 4

• I think I view myself primarily as a fiction writer. Poetry is more of a "hobby," a time of rest from the hard work of writing fiction.

  Yuriy Tarnawsky

  Hard Work, Writing, Thinking

  "No Tall Tales: An Interview With Yuriy Tarnawsky". Interview With David Moscovich, www.raintaxi.com. 2012.

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• Incidentally, I am intrigued by how many European and Latin American writers expressed their political views in the columns they routinely wrote or write in the popular press, like Saramago, Vargas Llosa, and Eco. This strikes me as one way of avoiding opinionated fiction, and allowing your imagination a broader latitude. Similarly, fiction writers from places like India and Pakistan are commonly expected to provide primers to their country's histories and present-day conflicts. But we haven't had that tradition in Anglo-America.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Country, Latin, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• One of my favourite contemporary fiction writers is a Texan, Ben Fountain. His extraordinary novel, Billy Lynn's Long Half-Time Walk, all takes place within the half-time show at a Dallas Cowboys football game. No one has better summed up the American appetite for spectacle, the link between sports and politics, and the absolute madness of George W. Bush's Iraq War.

  Adam Hochschild

  Sports, Football, War

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Different, Fiction, Kind

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

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• Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.

  John Updike

  Fiction, Care, Becoming

  Source: www.achievement.org

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• I remember I was very taken with a book called DreamTigers by [Jorge Luis] Borges. He was at the University of Texas, Austin, and they collected some of his writings and put them in a little collection. It's called DreamTigers in English, but it doesn't exist in Spanish. It's a little sampler. But that collection in English is what struck me, because in there he has his poems, and I was a poet as well as a fiction writer.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Book, Taken, Writing

  Source: quod.lib.umich.edu

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• In effect, I grew up in a sort of timewarp, a place where times are scrambled up. There are elements of my childhood that look to me now, in memory more like the 1940s or the 1950s than the 1960s. Jack [Womack] says that that made us science fiction writers, because we grew up experiencing a kind of time travel.

  William Gibson

  Memories, Childhood, Looks

  Source: craphound.com

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• here are the top three global resources getting scarcer in the twenty-first century: ozone layer, rain forest, people eager to read the fiction of others. That's right, folks. For the first time in I believe written history, there are far more fiction writers on earth than fiction readers.

  Sandra Tsing Loh

  Book, Reading, Rain

  Sandra Tsing Loh (2002). “A Year in Van Nuys”, Three Rivers Press

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• It's a scary thing for fiction writers, when you're always writing from the point of view both as and for someone who is different.

  Alice Mattison

  Writing, Views, Scary

  Source: therumpus.net

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• As a fiction writer, one of things you learn is God lives in specificity. You know, human kindness is increased as we pursue specificity.

  George Saunders

  Kindness, Fiction, God Life

  "In Search For Answers, Author George Saunders Covers Trump Campaign". "Weekend Edition Saturday" with Lynn Neary, www.npr.org. July 9, 2016.

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• My motto is: write about anything you bloody well like; just make sure you do it effectively. We've all had all the emotions, the rest is research and that leap which some can do and others cannot - it's not really something you can learn, otherwise all academics of literature would be wonderful fiction writers.

  Suhayl Saadi

  Writing, Would Be, Fiction

  "A new literary form is born: an interview with Suhayl Saadi". Interview With Sophie Erskine, www.3ammagazine.com.

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• My writing process is ritualized and monotonous, but there's no other way to get the job done. All other fiction writers I've met say the same thing.

  Douglas Coupland

  Jobs, Writing, Fiction

  Source: feathertale.com

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• For me, the fiction writer's job is to take the small, stupid process of learning to use an iPhone - and suddenly you're the guy who's asking your daughter, "When I go on Facebook, can it see me?"

  George Saunders

  Daughter, Jobs, Stupid

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I've always felt that no one understands why some books of non-fiction endure and some don't, because there's not much understanding among many non-fiction writers that the narrative is terribly important.

  Robert Caro

  Book, Understanding, Important

  "The Round Table: Fiction, Biography And The Use Of Power". Interview with Kurt Vonnegut, www.robertcaro.com. 1999.

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• It is important not to force a character into something. Fiction writers can be too controlling - usually that's a terror of our own unconscious processes.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Character, Important, Fiction

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• When fiction writers like my poems I feel like I've hit the jackpot.

  Cate Marvin

  Fiction, Jackpot, Feels

  Source: www.redividerjournal.org

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• The fiction writer has a lot of balls to juggle. Setting, pacing, dialogue, and so on. And let's not forget: plot. That was always a hard one for me. And I always had this spastic tendency to wrap up a story before I'd seen it the whole way through, a sort of writer's pre-ejaculatory tendency: "The End!"

  Cate Marvin

  Plot, Balls, Fiction

  Source: www.redividerjournal.org

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• The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.

  Tim O'Brien

  Struggle, Heart, Character

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• If you want to be a fiction writer, you need to start reading like a fiction writer. To do so, you need to learn about craft so that the next time you pick up a contemporary short story, you're reading it not as an abstraction floating in formaldehyde, existing simply for the theorist's dull scalpel to saw on, but as a concrete thing constructed out of words and shaped by syntax, brought to life by a writer who made several thousand choices, some large, some small, before letting that imperfect beauty, the story, walk on its own two feet.

  John McNally

  Reading, Writing, Two

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• Fiction writers have their own world, and poets have their own world, and literary criticism has sort of passed over into cultural studies in the university, and so on. They seem more disconnected from each other than they did when I first began to write.

  Robert Hass

  Writing, Criticism, Fiction

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I always wanted to be a fiction writer, but I couldn't figure out how you could be a novelist and make any money, which continues to be a problem for novelists the world over.

  Anna Quindlen

  Novelists, Fiction, World

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• I'd be surprised if non-fiction writers hate to be interviewed. We all hate them, because there's really nothing to say except "Read the book." Right? At least with non-fiction, you can kind of convey some information, and people can decide for themselves whether they want more of that kind of information. But with a novel, what am I going to do?

  Jonathan Franzen

  Hate, Book, People

  Interview with Gregg LaGambina, www.avclub.com. September 1, 2010.

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• I like to think of myself as a fiction writer who liked art enough to write about it for a while, and then went on to his fiction.

  Tom Robbins

  Art, Writing, Thinking

  "Oral history interview with Tom Robbins". Interview with Martha Kingsbury, www.aaa.si.edu. March 3, 1984.

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• I love science fiction. I always have, ever since I was a kid. I love a lot of science fiction writers. William Gibson is one of my favorite writers.

  Tahmoh Penikett

  Kids, Fiction, My Favorite

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• 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

  Expanding Universe, Mind, Wish

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