Esperanza Spalding Quotes

As fiction writers, we are entertainers.

I read a lot of fiction.

I know how to write fiction well.

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

I think one of the battles for fiction writers is how much to invent or exaggerate.

I like to read fiction.

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

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

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

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.

When writing fiction, you only have to know enough to be convincing on the page. I mean really convincing, of course - but you don't need academic depth.

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.

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.

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.

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.

'Seize the Story' takes readers all the way through the process of writing fiction, from beginning to end. Every element, from dialogue to setting, plotting to character creation, is laid out and illustrated with examples. But the tone of the book is not that of a dry writing manual - it's definitely written for teenagers.

Fiction novels, that's my game.

It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.

I knew from my television work that I could sit down and put words on paper but didn't know if I had the talent to tell a story in novel form.

I just don't think I'm very good at fiction.

For a while, when I got out of college, I tried to write fiction. I'd grown up more around novelists, and my initial attraction was to write fiction. But I was much less suited for it. I always struggled to figure out what people were saying or doing in a particular moment.

Authors make stuff up. Let's not pretend it's any more magical than that.

I don't think I have a very novelistic brain. I like to read, but I don't know if I could ever write a novel.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

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