Orson Scott Card Quotes

There's a reason that all societies and cultures and small bands of humans engage in myth-making. Fundamentally, it is to help us understand ourselves.

My writing has always been what you call 'narrative fiction' in the sense that it's got very strong plots and twists at the end.

We get so many people saying short fiction is not economical, that it doesn't sell; but there are so many of us enjoying writing it and reading it. So it's wonderful to be around people who love short fiction too - it's like hanging around with my tribe.

I have done some short pieces that are not horror.

Real people are never central characters in my works.

This is a cliche, but in fiction, I feel it is easier for me to get to some sort of truth, some kind of more honest writing.

Folktales are real.

Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches — nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.

We are the only animal that tells stories.

Short stories are not maybe the biggest deal in our culture anymore.

You don't have to have a true story to make a true story movie.

A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts.

I want to write some books. Books that have nothing to do with music, just some fiction type of books for a whole different audience of people.

I think there is no culture in which music is not very important and central. That's why I think of us as a sort of musical species.

This is an IMAGINARY STORY...aren't they all?

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

Every story we remember is a novel. Novels make things more universal.

A non-event ... is better to write about than an event, because with a non-event you can make up the meaning yourself, it means whatever you say it means.

The word story is intended to alert the reader to the fact that, however closely the narrative may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at work.

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

Here in the United States, we speak with reverence of authentic experience. We write poems about our daddies taking us fishing and breaking our hearts by making us throw the little fish back into the river. We even tell the reader the kind of car we were driving, the year and the model, to give the impression that it’s all true. It’s because we think of ourselves as journalists of a kind. Like them, we’ll go anywhere for a story. Don’t believe a word of it. As any poet can tell you, one often sees better with eyes closed than with eyes wide open.

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

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

What we know about writing the novel is the novel.