Fiction Writers Quotes - Page 7

• There are no such things as happy endings. Never. They're totally manufactured by fiction writers who choose to end the story on a high point.

  Peter David

  Fiction, Stories, Happy Endings

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• I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face

  Caleb Carr

  Kids, Artist, Faces

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• Me, I have a science fiction writer's conviction that the damn robot is supposed to speak
  human, not the other way around.

  Spider Robinson

  Robots, Fiction, Way

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• There's a fine line between imagination and reality. An inventor dreams something up, and pretty soon, it's there on the table before him. A science-fiction writer envisions another world, and then some space probe finds it. If you believe in something strongly enough, I think you can make it happen.

  Ridley Pearson

  Dream, Believe, Reality

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• The only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers.

  Sheri S. Tepper

  Science, Views, Long

  "Sheri S. Tepper: Speaking to the Universe". www.locusmag.com. September 1998.

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• Arnošt Lustig is one of the leading contemporary Czech fiction writers, and certainly the most important Jewish writer of Bohemia to have survived the Holocaust.

  Josef Skvorecky

  Holocaust, Important, Fiction

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• I think songwriters are more related to fiction writers. The Odyssey was a story in song. To me, that's so beautiful, all those painted characters, all those travels and adventures.

  Regina Spektor

  Beautiful, Song, Adventure

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• Fiction writers can’t be trusted. They make things up.

  Dan Poynter

  Writing, Fiction, Trusted

  Dan Poynter (2000). “The Self-publishing Manual: How to Write, Print, and Sell Your Own Book”, Para Publishing

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• In fact, one could argue that the skill of the fiction writer boils down to the ability to exploit intensity.

  James Scott Bell

  Writing, Skills, Fiction

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• 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

  Stars, Book, Writing

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• A fiction writer is never entirely alone. Her characters are constantly whispering in her ear.

  Cinda Williams Chima

  Character, Fiction, Ears

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• If you're a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don't censor, don't control. Listen, and write.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Writing, Character, People

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2015). “Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story”, p.100, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.

  Alain de Botton

  Writing, Trying, Attention

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• Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.

  John le Carre

  Fiction, Knows, Credible

  "Master of the Secret World: John le Carré on Deception, Storytelling and American Hubris" by Andrew Ross, www.salon.com. October 21, 1996.

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• I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Writing, Fiction, Preacher

  "Ursula K. Le Guin: Still Battling the Powers That Be". Wired interview, www.wired.com. July 25, 2012.

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• Futurism today is led by science-fiction writers, by sociologists, by historians. Now, I have nothing against them. I'm sure they do great work. But they're not scientists. They're clueless.

  Michio Kaku

  Clueless, Fiction, Today

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• George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I'm 100 percent fiction writer... I don't want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don't state my political messages to anybody.

  Haruki Murakami

  Writing, Thinking, Political

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• It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Attachment, Fiction

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.131, Macmillan

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• A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it's not as satisfying in the end.

  Chaim Potok

  Writing, Fiction, Shapes

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• It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational - and I'm speaking the written science fiction, not 'Star Trek.' Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they're clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.

  Terry Pratchett

  Stars, Clever, Real

  "Sir Terry Pratchett: hallucinating gently for a living". Interview with Corinne Podger, www.abc.net.au. April 30, 2011.

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

  Stephen King

  Writing, Wish, Fiction

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• Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.

  Ray Bradbury

  Fun, Talking, Civilization

  Brown Daily Herald, March 24, 1995.

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• You can, in short, lead the life of the mind, which is, despite some appalling frustrations, the happiest life on earth. And one day, in the thick of this, approaching some partial vision, you will (I swear) find yourself on the receiving end of - of all things - an "idea for a story," and you will, God save you, start thinking about writing some fiction of your own. Then you will understand, in what I fancy might be a blinding flash, that all this passionate thinking is what fiction is about, that all those other fiction writers started as you did, and are laborers in the same vineyard.

  Annie Dillard

  Writing, Frustration, Thinking

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• In accordance with the terms of the Clarke-Asimov treaty, the second-best science writer dedicates this book to the second-best science-fiction writer. [dedication to Isaac Asimov from Arthur C. Clarke in his book Report on Planet Three]

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Book, Dedication, Three

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• There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it's well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Stupidity, Quality

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.77, Macmillan

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