Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

The way I usually put it is that as an SF writer, I'm never required to be right.

I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.

I, as the writer, can be very clear that I am writing a work of heightened fiction, as opposed to documenting horrible things that happen every day in the world. Which I have no interest in doing.

I always was interested in prose. As a teenager, I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and I find this more difficult in poetry.

NOVEL, n. A short story padded.

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

I love literature deeply. I view books as sacred things, and in writing my story, I'm going to do my best to honor the form that has played such a huge part in shaping who I am.

To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.

A novel means a new way of doing a story. If you go back the origins of a novel, 'Clarissa' - that's not a novel; it's just a bunch of letters. But it isn't! Because it's organised in a particular way! A novel is what you make of it.

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels.

Writing and telling are almost the same, the way I do it.

The short story is still like the novel's wayward younger brother, we know that it's not respectable - but I think that can also add to the glory of it.

The wonderful thing about writing fiction is that no one is stopping you. There's no one saying, 'You can't do that.'

The short story, on the other hand, is the perfect American form.

All that I did was to avail myself of the great privileges of the fiction writer, spring over every scientific difficulty with fancy’s seven-leagued boots, and create on paper what other men were planning out in steel and other metals.

Being a novelist, you can roam around with a story and indulge yourself.

I can't stand the short story form, which, after all, is a magazine form.

I am a newspaper columnist and a professional screenwriter, but my real love is the novel for all the room it has for characters to come alive and breathe and face their challenges.

A novel - it's also a way of attacking subjects that you cannot confront in the eye.

I get to use fiction as a way to work out my thinking and to delight readers in the process. I can't think of any deal that's better for me, and I'm always so grateful that readers have indulged me as I argue with myself in my stories.

I have this long-running idea that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is not just, 'Did it happen or didn't it happen?' It's one of form.

For myself, I feel more natural writing stories or novels than writing plays. I feel more like myself, like I can express myself better, and like I have a greater clarity about what I want to do.

The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrated, can be more visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis. I do not mean to say that the short story is by any means exempt from the laws of narrative: it must observe them, but on its own terms.

I write because I have authority from life to do so.

Our lives are songs; God write the words And we set them to music at pleasure; And the song grows glad, or sweet or sad, As we choose to fashion the measure.