Zane Grey Quotes

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

I enjoy receiving and giving realistic fiction, for both children and adults, with strong characters, beautiful language, and humane visions.

I think many people would say that writers like Stephen King have hypergraphia.

It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

To be interested in short stories, you have to be interested in fiction as an art form.

When I write fiction, I never try to deliver a message; I just want to tell a story. But I admit that I want the story to be memorable and the characters to touch the reader's heart.

Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory.

That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.

Novels can be a snapshot of a moment in time, or several moments in time, and as a reader, that's what I really like, and as a writer, it's what I'm drawn to also.

I think that fiction has a certain power.

Honestly, I don't focus on what my writing is called. I don't mean to sound artsy and pretentious, I just really can't think of things in that way. For me, the point is telling a story that keeps people up past bedtime, while hopefully exploring ideas that resonate.

I believe any fiction writer is inspired by real life.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

I think that my passion for writing fantasy began at about the same time as my passion for reading fantasy.

It wasn't until I was in my teens that I started admiring writers as inspirations for my own work, and my earliest influences there were Stephen King, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Richard Adams.

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.