Writing Fiction Quotes - Page 4

• I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

  Roxane Gay

  Writing, Fiction, World

  "Roxane Gay Will Make You Proud to Be a Bad Feminist". Interview with Hannah Levintova, www.motherjones.com. July 24, 2014.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Writing fiction is an act of imagination and fantasizing, and it's not relating in prose what you've been doing for the last two or three years.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Writing, Years, Two

  Interview with Joshua Klein, www.avclub.com. March 17, 1999.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I love writing fiction - you can take just what you want from a place, and leave the rest.

  Kate Grenville

  Writing, Fiction, Want

  Source: www.compulsivereader.com

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• It takes a certain kind of mind to narrate, to work through character motivation, to be unforgiving to one's writer-self when it comes down to creating the minutiae of detail. Writing fiction requires stamina, a sense of how people's lives work, how people work toward and against one another and, above all, precision.

  Cate Marvin

  Motivation, Writing, Character

  Source: www.redividerjournal.org

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I came to fantasy fairly late. For some ten years, I had been happily writing fiction and non-fiction for adults. But I always loved fantasy, whether for adults or young people; and at that particular point in my life, I wanted to try it, to understand it, as part of the process of learning to be a writer. The results were beyond anything I could have foreseen. As I've said often and elsewhere, it was the most creative and liberating experience of my life.

  Lloyd Alexander

  Writing, Years, People

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have a process that I seem to always, to some degree, as a writer, adhere to, but I certainly have never imposed the way I write a novel on my students. When I had students, I never said, "You should never start writing a novel until you have the last sentence." I never did that, and I wouldn't do it now, but people now seem so interested in the process [of writing fiction] that I have to constantly make it clear when I describe mine that I'm not being prescriptive. I'm not proselytizing.

  John Irving

  Writing, People, Degrees

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Writing grew out of the pleasure of escape. My novels are very much outside of my personal experience. That is why I love writing fiction. It allows me to leave my existence and inhabit other lives.

  Danielle Trussoni

  Writing, Fiction, Pleasure

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I love the resource of the Internet. I use it all the time. Anything I'm writing - for example, if I'm writing a scene about Washington D.C. and I want to know where this monument is, I can find it right away, I can get a picture of the monument, it just makes your life so much easier, especially if you're writing fiction. You can check stuff so much quicker, and I think that's all great for writers.

  Dave Barry

  Writing, Thinking, Fiction

  Source: www.writersdigest.com

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• ...writing fiction...is no job for intellectual cowards.

  Stephen King

  Jobs, Writing, Intellectual

  4 Copy quote

• The good thing about writing fiction is that you can get back at people.

  John Grisham

  Writing, People, Fiction

  4 Copy quote

• I find it only natural for a storyteller to be interested in storytelling and, for anyone who spends the better part of his or her life writing fiction, it is hardly surprising that the pleasures, worries, and mechanics of fiction-making should enter the work.

  Norman Lock

  Writing, Worry, Fiction

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• So for a long time, I did a lot of freelance writing in addition to writing fiction and such - I was a food critic for a magazine for a bit, I did writing for nonprofits and political things, I was the editorial consultant for another magazine for a couple years, all sorts of jobs.

  Tod Goldberg

  Jobs, Couple, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I always say writing fiction isn't something you teach. It's something you do, and only experimentation - i.e. doing it, either badly or good sometimes - can help anybody get any better or worse at it.

  Peter Orner

  Writing, Fiction, Helping

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's much harder when you're writing about your life, than when you're writing fiction.

  Leigh Newman

  Writing, Fiction, Harder

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I sometimes get asked if I think about film stuff while I'm writing fiction, and the answer is, of course not.

  Matthew Specktor

  Writing, Thinking, Fiction

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The tales are quite hard to remember and I found that going back to it between bouts of writing fiction, I was having to retrace my steps quite a lot, because the stories are very intricate and the material is elusive, and possibly with age, my memory is not as malleable as it used to be.

  Marina Warner

  Memories, Writing, Age

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A friend of mine urged me to see my pain as an opportunity. And since the same psychic that contacted Dion Fortune had told me that I was a "teacher" - she didn't mean at Columbia, she meant in the spiritual sense - I decided my affliction was the universe telling me that it was time to stop writing fiction and become the spiritual guru I was clearly meant to be.

  Heidi Julavits

  Spiritual, Teacher, Pain

  "The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Heidi Julavits". Interview with Angela Stubbs, therumpus.net. October 14, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.

  Alexander Chee

  Spiritual, Writing, Thinking

  "Go Forth (Vol. 41)". Interview with Kristen Evans, logger.believermag.com. February 26, 2016.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The best writing advice I ever got was "Keep moving forward, don't retreat into rewrites." The worst came from a book that said "Writing fiction is like telling lies," which just seems stupid to me.

  David B. Coe

  Lying, Stupid, Book

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• You can't be wrong in journalism. Take a wrong turn in journalism, and you are writing fiction. You can take a wrong turn in poetry, and something wonderful can happen.

  Eliza Griswold

  Writing, Fiction, Journalism

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• [Jack] Kerouac was writing fiction. What he did when he wrote about me...he made me out with Russian Countesses and Swiss accounts and other things I didn't have or didn't happen and so on.

  William S. Burroughs

  Writing, Fiction, Made

  Source: www.litkicks.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The triumph of writing fiction is that by doing so, writers can build a more ideal world in themselves.

  Lauren Groff

  Writing, Triumph, Fiction

  Interview with Jason Skipper, therumpus.net. August 24, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• As a young kid I assumed that everybody was sort of on the same wavelength as I was and then I found out in a lot of small ways that that wasn't the case. It's sort of a mixed blessing. My mind is like a puppy. It goes all over. I guess writing fiction was a way of harnessing that. I could hook a puppy up to a treadmill and get something out of it.

  George Saunders

  Writing, Kids, Blessing

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• My general approach to writing fiction is that you try to have as few conceptual notions as possible and you just respond to the energy that the story is making rather than having a big over plan. I think if you have a big over plan, the danger is that you might just take your plan and then you bore everybody. I always joke that it's like going on a date with index cards. You know, at 7:30 p.m. I should ask about her mother. You keep all the control to yourself but you are kind of insulting to the other person.

  George Saunders

  Mother, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I am writing political op-eds, I do think carefully about the impact of my words. When I am writing fiction, it's a different story. In my fiction I am more reckless. I don't care about the real world until I am done with the book.

  Elif Safak

  Real, Book, Writing

  Source: www.spiegel.de

  4 Copy quote

  Show source