Fiction Writers Quotes

Stories are not explanations of the world we live in. Science does that, and math does that. Our obligation as fiction writers is to enhance the mysteries.

It's true of so many fiction writers that I much prefer the essayistic work they did, whether it's David Foster Wallace's, or John Cheever's, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's.

Most fiction writers are driven to find their own 'voice,' but I am more interested in the voices of others.

Fiction writers have their own world, and poets have their own world, and literary criticism has sort of passed over into cultural studies in the university, and so on. They seem more disconnected from each other than they did when I first began to write.

I love contemporary North American fiction and short fiction. My favorite writer is Jonathan Franzen, and my favorite writers of short fiction are George Saunders and Alice Munro.

People have always heard voices. Sometimes they're called shamans, sometimes they're called mad, and sometimes they're called fiction writers. I always feel lucky that I live in a culture where fiction writing is legal and not seen as pathology.

Fiction writers tend to err either making people more than they are or less than they are. I'd rather err on the side of the former.

Writers are liars my dear, surely you know that by now?

It seems like every few years a big name author will holler something about how evil, heinous, and morally wrong fan fiction and fan fiction writers are, and then the Internet gets all upset and shocked, and then the author is shocked that people could get so upset.

Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don't think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously.

Writers, at least writers of fiction, are always full of anxiety and worry.

I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don't. When I first started writing, I just started writing a novel. It's a hard way to learn to write. I don't recommend it to my students, but it just happens that way for some of us.

However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.

Well you can't believe everything you read. After all, by definition, fiction writers lie for a living.

As fiction writers, we are entertainers.

That's what fiction writers do: create characters and do terrible things to them for the entertainment of others. If they feel guilty enough, they write happy endings.

The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.

I think a fairly common behavior among fiction writers is that they want to help. They're generally charitable people. They're interested in the world. They're curious, they're empathetic. They understand suffering. They don't turn away from that. But what they do is essentially useless. Except for the sake of the thing itself.

Some of the best fiction writers got their start writing airline menus.

I was clasified as a 'Science Fiction' writer simply because I wrote about Schenectady.

I can't be alone among fiction writers in regarding the world, so much weirder than anything we could make up, as beating us at our own game or in racking my brains over what could possibly constitute a contribution when novels pale before the newspaper.

The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.

When I think about writers who use fiction as social commentary and to raise social awareness but who are also very popular, I think of Dickens.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

It's safe to say that all poets are manic-depressives, but fiction writers are on that scale, too.