Chaim Potok Quotes

I'm a fast writer, and crime novels are easy to do. It's much harder to write a 1,000 word article, where everything has to be 100 per cent correct.

I'm still very much a believer in the spontaneity of certain kinds of writing. But then you have to eventually, when you're writing a long play, make adjustments along the way - all kinds of adjustments.

Writing fiction, I really just sit there and it just comes.

Write. Write. Write. Learn how to revise. No story is perfect straight from the keyboard.

Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?

Obviously, I like to write stories that are page-turners. But I always try my very, very hardest to be as factually true as possible.

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.

I have friends who are capable of writing a very rough draft and then going back and embroidering - they're sort of the cathedral builders of fiction. I never really know what I'm doing, and all my pleasure's on the level of the line.

If you get a bad script, then you start expending energy trying to make a silk purse of a sow's ear. When the script's as good as those on 'Game of Thrones,' say, I don't think there was a single occasion where any of us thought there was a bad scene.

Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.

Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.

It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.

While writing a novel, I don't read anything new in fiction. I am too engrossed.

In terms of going back and forth between fiction and nonfiction - in which I'll include memoir, biography, and true crime - is that one relieves the other.

I always write the script by myself.

I took a lot of writing courses.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

I tend to research as I write so that the narrative can take priority, which is important for a piece of fiction, I think, finding out facts as and when I need to.

Every time I've had to do journalistic investigations, I've cursed, but later I discovered that it had helped me enormously with writing fiction. It's the one thing that can save me from becoming an academic writer.

I rewrote the ending to 'Farewell to Arms,' the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don't know any of these writers.

And if you have great writing, it's really easy, but if it's not so great and you have to work a little harder, I could tell where the work needed to be done but comedy is just fun.

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.