Anne Fadiman Quotes

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.

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

Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.

I read a lot of fiction.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.

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

I know I'm not a wordsmith. And I don't write poetry. Sometimes I think I should, because it's really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.

I don't write autobiographically.

If you just take me as a fiction writer, then you're probably going to find me fairly limited.

I like to read fiction.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

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.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

One of the things I love about writing is the way you can use what you know and what you've experienced, without actually writing about yourself. I've given many of my experiences and perceptions to many of the characters in the book, but none of them is me.

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

I want to do some fiction writing, I've had some pretty good luck with short stories, I'd like to do a couple of larger things.

When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

I do write a lot from personal experience, but I also embellish a bit.