Conrad Aiken Quotes

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

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.

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

What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

I'm very involved in the writing on every level.

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.

When I tell people there are three stories in 'Thunderstruck' that were from the same wrecked novel, they want to guess what they are. Nobody has. There are no characters or timelines in common. They're structured very differently. A good novel wouldn't have pulled apart so easily.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.

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

I like going back and writing fiction.

I write and write and write, and then I edit it down to the parts that I think are amusing, or that help the storyline, or I'll write a notebook full of ideas of anecdotes or story points, and then I'll try and arrange them in a way that they would tell a semi-cohesive story.

All of my novels are seeded in real life events, and 'The Wreckage' is no different.

I didn't have any particular talent for fiction. I took a class in college.

It's important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he's writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering.

Novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver.

I'm a competent novelist. I'm getting better. But I'm a really good short story writer.

The fact that I had spent so many years doing media criticism and thinking really seriously about theme and structure did definitely help. Doing that for several years indirectly built a lot of tools that I would end up using when writing my own fiction.

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

I don't think I'm more of a screenwriter than I am a fiction writer. I'm more of a reader than a film-watcher, so I imagine that I'm not approaching fiction or films in a particularly cinematic way.

There are vast differences between scripts and stories, of course. Few fiction writers would want to give up the opportunity to explore how the minds of their characters work, or to set aside the opportunity to provide necessary background exposition in a succinct fashion.

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.

When you're writing a story, you're creating something of an artificial ending.

I have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest of the story. Technique can't operate at all, of course, except on believable material.