Fiction Writers Quotes - Page 8

• I'm in love. And I like how that feels. And I hate how that feels. Because love is an invention of fiction writers.

  Ellen Hopkins

  Hate, Love Is, Fiction

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• Being a fiction writer is really like being an actor, because if you're going to write convincingly it has to sound right and play right. The only way that works is to emotionally and technically act out and see the scene you're in. There's no better job in the world, because when I sit down at that computer I'm the world's best forensics expert, if that's what I'm writing about that day. Or I'm some crazed psycho running down a dark alley. Or I'm a gorgeous woman looking to find a man that night. Whatever! But I'm all of those things, every day. How can you beat that?

  Ridley Pearson

  Running, Jobs, Writing

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• 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.

  William Trevor

  Distance, Writing, Thinking

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• Here's a quick rule of thumb: Don't annoy science fiction writers. These are people who destroy entire planets before lunch. Think of what they'll do to you.

  John Scalzi

  Inspirational, Funny, Life

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• There's a perilous word fiction writers need to watch out for. The word is 'had.'

  James Scott Bell

  Watches, Needs, Fiction

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• A science fiction writer should try to combine the intimately human with the grandly cosmic.

  Robert J. Sawyer

  Trying, Fiction, Should

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• I actually very rarely see comedy myself, and although I admire the work of some comics, it does come from all over, so I’ll get a charge out of some fiction writers and poets.

  Dylan Moran

  Doe, Fiction, Comedy

  "Dylan Moran Makes Sentences of Things". Interview with J.L. Sirisuk, www.interviewmagazine.com. June 13, 2013.

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• If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.

  Anthony Burgess

  Sex, Writing, Fiction

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• Some of the best fiction writers got their start writing airline menus.

  Erma Bombeck

  Funny, Humorous, Food

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• There are vast differences between scripts and stories, of course. Few fiction writers would want to give up the opportunity to explore how the minds of their characters work, or to set aside the opportunity to provide necessary background exposition in a succinct fashion.

  Les Standiford

  Fashion, Giving Up, Writing

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• 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

  Football, Writing, Wine

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• Fiction writers are strange beasts. They are, like all writers, observers first and foremost. Everything that happens to and around them is potential material for a story, and they look at it that way.

  Terry Brooks

  Writing, Looks, Fiction

  Terry Brooks (2003). “Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life”, p.24, Del Rey

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• Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail.

  Rudy Rucker

  Fiction, Principles, Wonder

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• I think every fiction writer, to a certain extent, is a schizophrenic and able to have two or three or five voices in his or her body. We seek, through our profession, to get those voices onto paper.

  Ridley Pearson

  Thinking, Two, Voice

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• Fiction writers come up with some interesting metaphors when speaking of plot. Some say the plot is the highway and the characters are the automobiles. Others talk about stories that are "plot-driven," as if the plot were neither the highway nor the automobile, but the chauffeur. Others seem to have plot phobia and say they never plot. Still others turn up their noses at the very notion, as if there's something artificial, fraudulent, contrived.

  James N. Frey

  Character, Writing, Interesting

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• I think fiction writers write what they do because no one else has written it and they want to read it.

  Alan Cheuse

  Writing, Thinking, Fiction

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• Many fiction writers who put the science in dont get it right.

  Kathy Reichs

  Fiction

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• Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all.

  Theodore Sturgeon

  Philosophical, Writing, Humor

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• Understand now, I'm purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all the writers, keenly interested in human welfare whom I know, laugh at the prohibition law.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Believe, Law, Laughing

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• The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.

  Tana French

  Historical, Fiction, Mystery

  "Tana French: I'm haunted by Ireland's ghost estates" by Alison Flood, www.theguardian.com. July 27, 2012.

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• Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.

  Rudy Rucker

  Character, Work Out, Rude

  "Adventures In Gnarly Computation". www.rudyrucker.com. October 2005.

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• Captain Crawford didn't like the idea of any kind of murder, but he went at it patiently and honestly and with none of the stupidity and bombast and rubber-hose techniques that Los Angeles crime fiction writers had led me to expect. I'd gotten the impression that unless a gifted amateur in love with the lady got himself almost beaten to a pulp and practically inside the lethal gas chamber before he unmasked the venal and brutalized constabulary, any innocent bystander they could get their hands on was a gone duck.

  Leslie Ford

  Bystanders, Hands, Ideas

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• The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.

  Vernor Vinge

  Science, Creative, Fiction

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• Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.

  David Foster Wallace

  Writing, Would Be, Fiction

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• Murderer who lives in my building. His name is Dan Bevacqua. Hes a fiction writer.

  Arda Collins

  Names, Fiction, Building

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