Judith Guest Quotes

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

I write novels and other things.

Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.

I learnt to love reading. And then I started scribbling stories, and I liked that even more.

While I was in high school, I discovered and began writing science fiction.

I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.

It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, John Updike... Eudora Welty - that I became excited about the possibilities of writing.

'Sag Harbor' was a very different book for me. It changed the way I thought about books that I wanted to do.

I have always loved short stories. I have been at least as influenced by the short story masters as I have been by novelists.

I have always enjoyed literature classes, and I took a fiction workshop for writing and analyzing at Curtis... I don't know if would do it professionally, but it's nice to have the balance with the music.

I know now why I stopped writing short stories. It was at the point when I recognised how difficult they were.

Really, I've worked my whole adult life at fiction, to try and write fiction.

Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.

The older I get and the more fiction I write, the more I outline, the more I think about plot before I dive in and plunge too far.

The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own.

The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.

The MFA program did one great thing for me: It taught me how to be a better reader and critic. Nothing I wrote during my time at Columbia remains - but learning how to really deconstruct a work of fiction - that, of course, is a permanent part of me now.

My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow.

When I wrote my first book, 'The Tennis Party', my overriding concern was that I didn't write the autobiographical first novel. I was so, so determined not to write about a 24-year-old journalist. It was going to have male characters, and middle-aged people, so I could say, 'Look, I'm not just writing about my life, I'm a real author.'

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

The great pleasure for me in writing short stories is the fierce, elegant challenge.

I started writing by doing small related things but not the thing itself, circling it and getting closer. I had no idea how to write fiction. So I did journalism because there were rules I could learn. You can teach someone to write a news story. They might not write a great one, but you can teach that pretty easily.

I would like to write a book that wasn't so violent and weird, but I just don't think I can do that with my talent. I don't think it would come off.

My first novel, 'Sacrifice,' was set on the Shetland Islands.

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.