Writing Quotes

Writing is the one thing I know I will never grow tired of in life, the one thing I could do until the day I die and still feel like I haven’t done enough.

~ Allison J. Kennedy

I am occasionally desired by congenital imbeciles and the editors of magazines to say something about the writing of detective fiction “from the woman’s point of view.” To such demands, one can only say “Go away and don’t be silly. You might as well ask what is the female angle on an equilateral triangle.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

A good novel, one which entices the author as much as it beckons the reader.

~ W.j. Raymond

It's 1am, I have fiction to write!

~ C.s. Woolley

Darling, in this family we don't call anyone a novelist who has not written more books than Jane Austen.

~ Pansy Schneider-Horst

If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people.

~ David Foster Wallace

To write is to reveal oneself.When I write something, fiction or non-fiction, I do not expect you to accept what I write, nor to agree with what I propose.I expect you to spend at least a tenth of a second to think about it - may be not about the characters, nor about the piece, but at least about the idea.

~ Sanhita Baruah

Good horror offers a sense of an upended, lawless world and that’s appealing to anyone who grew up feeling like an outsider.

~ Christopher Rice

All of fiction is truthful. What you create is your own truth and no one can take that away or change it.

~ Walter Dean Myers

I read not for entertainment but to feel what the writer has felt while writing even though if it was fiction.

~ Pushpa Rana

Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible.

~ C.s. Lewis

Novelists congratulate themselves on their creation of this kind of “character” or that kind of “character,” and readers pretend to talk knowingly about “character,” but all it amounts to is that the writers are enjoying themselves writing lies and the readers are enjoying themselves reading lies. In fact, there is no such thing as character, something fixed and final. The real thing is something that novelists don’t know how to write about. Or, if they tried, the end result would never be a novel. Real people are strangely difficult to make sense out of. Even a god would have his hands full trying.

~ Sōseki Natsume

Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence, many epic tales are pretty much epic crap.

~ Stephen King

Like the 'good' characters in literature, the sane don't have any memorable lines.

~ Adam Phillips Going Sane

Most stories are not about peoplebut about life, an addiction like the rest of themthat destroys you even as you love it,but you love it anyway and can never get enough.

~ Michael Hogan

Good writing should help us see the world in new ways, it should crack open our generosity towards each other. That's what I hope my work does anyway. I want someone to read it and know that they aren't alone in the universe. I want my words to act as connective tissue.

~ Patrick Hicks

The Adventure called and I followed with my thumb like a character being written by an intractable author. Which, of course, I was.

~ Sol Luckman

I wasn't writing home. I wasn't writing a death letter, either. I was writing a death journal, a piece of fiction meant for my family and my fiancee, Sara.

~ Clint Van Winkle

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. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or to present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable. This process is complicated and confusing and scary, and also hard work, but it turns out to be the best fun there is.The fact that you can now sustain the fun of writing only by confronting the very same unfun parts of yourself you’d first used writing to avoid or disguise is another paradox, but this one isn’t any kind of bind at all. What it is is a gift, a kind of miracle, and compared to it the reward of strangers’ affection is as dust, lint.

~ David Foster Wallace

I can be a woman on a mission. But I'll choose what mission that is. And that my friend is where youll see the results.

~ Kia Carrington-Russell

Historical fiction of course is particularly research-heavy. The details of everyday life are there to trip you up. Things that we take for granted, indeed, hardly think about, can lead to tremendous mistakes.

~ Sara Sheridan

Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there.

~ Sara Sheridan

I've always felt that good writing does not have to be literary.

~ Sara Sheridan

I know a lot of writers, and everyone works differently, but this is something that we truly have in common across all genres - the fiction has to be real inside your head.

~ Sara Sheridan

I have no problem in moving a date one way or another or coming up with a subplot that gets my characters in (or out) of a fix more rambunctiously than the extant records show.

~ Sara Sheridan

When writing fiction, you learn to only put things and characters in, that are going to progress your story. There is something to be learned about that approach in real life

~ Carl Henegan

Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire.

~ Sara Sheridan

You spill a lot of beans in historical fiction. Crime fiction is about spilling no beans at all. You spill the least beans you possibly can. So because I had already written historical fiction before I was really good at the spilling beans section, but the new skill I had to learn when I was writing Brighton Belle was difficult. I had to avoid the equivalent of shouting, this character's a murderer! Look who did it!.

~ Sara Sheridan

Archive material is vital to the writer of historical fiction.

~ Sara Sheridan

[Referring to passage by Alice Munro] Finally, the passage contradicts a form of bad advice often given young writers -- namely, that the job of the author is to show, not tell. Needless to say, many great novelists combine dramatic showing with long sections of the flat-out authorial narration that is, I guess, what is meant by telling. And the warning against telling leads to a confusion that causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out -- don't tell us a character is happy, show us how she screams yay and jumps up and down for joy -- when in fact the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language.

~ Francine Prose

I have found that in fiction one is freer to speak the truth, if only because in fiction the truth is not expected or required. You may easily disguise it, so that it is only recognized much later, when the story and the characters have faded into darkness.

~ Philip Sington

Stories serve multiple purposes. At a basic level they are great entertainment, which is essential for living a happy and healthy life, but on a deeper level stories help us explore issues that are otherwise difficult to address. On one hand a good book helps us escape our troubles, and on the other hand it can help us face up to those troubles by bringing real issues to the fore, often in a more manageable way, since the problems are experienced vicariously through the eyes of another.

~ Dean F. Wilson

Writing is a solitary business. It’s just you and your characters and a blank page you need to fill.

~ Shannon Celebi

And why is it all men thinkeverything a woman writes is trivial or trashy-or just plain sillydrivel? Don't men have romantic notions? Don't men dream of findingthe perfect love?

~ V.c. Andrews

Writing a book with completely fictitious characters is like running a democracy, centered around a capital state. You constantly live with the fear & suspicion that one of the characters will start an uncontrollable rebellion.

~ Shomprakash Sinha Roy

Writing is just building a new world – one character, one place, one maniac at a time.

~ Carla H. Krueger

Finally I do like best of all stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace out there there exists an urgency—a chaos—, an insanity, a misrule of some dire sort which can end life as we know it but for the fact that this very story is written, this order found, this style determined, the worst averted, and we are beneficiaries of that order by being readers.

~ Richard Ford

I long for some connection, to the real and those who love them, and hope that my fiction can reach beyond the veil, that I might touch someone and make them feel something…or something.

~ Shannon Celebi

We live in a society that doesn’t offer any support or appreciation for ventures that aren’t clearly articulated and aligned for a goal. A writer gets past this. It’s going to be a mess before you’re finished, and you may not have a name for the mess or understand its utilitarian purposes. There aren't words for everything. For now, we’ll call it the draft of a story.

~ Ron Carlson

Write about the thing that scares you most or your most private confession and you'll never have a problem coming up with decent fiction.

~ Don Roff