Writing Fiction Quotes - Page 5

• I don't think writing fiction has changed my worldview.

  Donald Ray Pollock

  Writing, Thinking, Fiction

  Source: therumpus.net

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• My work is very eclectic. I write books that range from writing fiction, writing fable where I am very directly trying to imagine alternate worlds, to writing about [Buckminster] Fuller who was the ultimate world man creating all sorts of alternate worlds and believing that they were imminent to my own work of - for instance, a project that I've been working on for some year and a half, two years now that continues to evolve has been what I call Deep Time Photography.

  Jonathon Keats

  Photography, Believe, Book

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Even when I think of writing fiction, it's being kind of a liar, a storyteller, a weaver, and there's that sense of how much of this is your life. The story is a way you unravel your life from behind a mask.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Liars, Writing, Thinking

  Interview David Barsamian, progressive.org. October 1, 2003.

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• You write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Writing, Fiction, Memoir

  "Elizabeth Gilbert, ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ Author, On What It Takes To Get Inspired". Interview with Chantal Pierrat, www.huffingtonpost.com. August 11, 2013.

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• When I started writing fiction it always seemed in retrospect (I didn't realise at the time) that it was always caused by environments rather than by incidents and characters.

  Jonathan Meades

  Writing, Character, Fiction

  Source: thequietus.com

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• Our minds simply don't function in some sort of narrative chronology. I think that one of the great gifts of writing fiction is being able to think about that.

  Dani Shapiro

  Writing, Thinking, Mind

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 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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• Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.

  Roald Dahl

  Writing, Two, People

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• I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.

  Peter Straub

  Writing, Ambition, Fiction

  "PETER STRAUB: Connoisseur of Fear". Interview with Paula Guran, www.darkecho.com. June, 1997.

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• The process of writing fiction is totally unconscious. It comes from what you are learning, as you live, from within. For me, all writing is a process of discovery. We are looking for the meaning of life. No matter where you are, there are conflicts and dramas everywhere. It is the process of what it means to be a human being; how you react and are reacted upon, these inward and outer pressures. If you are writing with a direct cause in mind, you are writing propaganda. It's fatal for a fiction writer.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Drama, Writing, Mean

  "Nadine Gordimer on dividing fact from fiction" by Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. November 8, 2010.

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• When I'm writing about reality, I'm writing about death. When I'm writing fiction, I'm writing about life.

  Ralph Peters

  Writing, Reality, Fiction

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• It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Believe, Writing, Cells

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• Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.

  Siri Hustvedt

  Writing, Fiction, Remember

  Siri Hustvedt (2007). “A Plea for Eros: Essays”, p.41, Macmillan

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• The key of writing fiction isn't just to remove something that the reader or listener can easily imagine. It's not a matter of being coy, or withholding information. It's allowing for multiple possibilities, recognizing the complexity of human behavior, and making the world of a piece of fiction as marvelously confounding as the world we live in.

  Peter Turchi

  Writing, Keys, Fiction

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• One learns much more by writing fiction, because the insights come from those deeper subconscious levels where the greater and more interesting truths lie.

  Francine du Plessix Gray

  Lying, Writing, Interesting

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• The art of writing fiction is to sail as dangerously close to the truth as possible without sinking the ship

  Kinky Friedman

  Art, Writing, Fiction

  "Cowboy Logic: The Wit and Wisdom of Kinky Friedman". Book by Kinky Friedman, 2006.

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• I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer's creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen

  Laura Hillenbrand

  Writing, Creativity, Thinking

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• Nothing changed in my life since I work all the time," Pamuk said then. "I've spent 30 years writing fiction. For the first 10 years I worried about money and no one asked me how much money I made. The second decade I spent money and no one was asking me about that. And I've spent the last 10 years with everyone expecting to hear how I spend the money, which I will not do.

  Orhan Pamuk

  Writing, Years, Fiction

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• Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction.

  Arthur Golden

  Mother, Reading, Writing

  "A talk with Arthur Golden". Interview with Miles O'Brien, www.cnn.com. March 23, 1999.

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• Once I got started, I wanted the life of a writer so fiercely that nothing could stop me. I wanted the intensity, the sense of aliveness that came from writing fiction. I'm still that way. My life is worth living when I've completed a good paragraph.

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  Writing, Way, Fiction

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• Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language.

  Hilma Wolitzer

  Lonely, Writing, Character

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• Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel.

  David Foster Wallace

  Fun, Writing, Fiction

  David Foster Wallace (2012). “Both Flesh And Not”, p.129, Penguin UK

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• I think one of the paradoxes of writing fiction is when people enjoy it, they want it to be real. So they look for connections.

  Junot Diaz

  Real, Writing, Thinking

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• Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Different, Fiction

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Sep 23, 2011

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• I love the secrecy of writing fiction. When I write a novel, I don't tell anybody what I'm doing. I'm living in my private world. And it's a great sensation.

  Umberto Eco

  Writing, World, Fiction

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