Ya Fiction Quotes

I believe that all fiction is personal and all writing is at some level personal.

Nonfiction gives you subjects. Writing fiction I can have more fun, but I have to invent my subject.

One of the things that all authors of fiction must learn to judge is whether - and in what detail - to describe the face of a character.

I honestly believe that everything I know about the writing of non-fiction (or writing) could be engraved on the head of a pin with a garden hoe.

She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in.

For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.

I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure.

Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.

Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.

I think anyone who writes suspense fiction and says that King isn't an influence is either lying or being foolish.

It's fiction's job to express how it feels to be living now, and it's a complex feeling, full of contradiction. To me it often feels like a brutal trivialization of reality.

This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren't.

I would never ever condone any violence of any kind. But in the theater of fiction, blood is delightful.

[She] always knew he was a fiction but believed in him anyway.

Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.

In terms of fiction, I'd rather go out and have a good time than read a book about someone having a good or bad time.

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.

I feel I'm functioning at some level as a journalist because even though I write fiction, I'm trying to get the world accurate.

As a fiction writer, of course, you need to take some leeway with certain aspects of history to make the story work.

The great thing about fiction is that you can start off by telling the truth, then start making stuff up like crazy whenever you feel like it.

I read a ton of fiction - historical, contemporary, literary, commercial, I love it all.

Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.

I don't think I have ever created an entire fiction piece or followed a historical piece and made that into a sermon.

Before I'm a zombie nerd, before I'm a science-fiction nerd, I am a history nerd.

Being serious is serious business in fiction. It's commercial or hoi polloi in fiction to be funny. It's too accessible to the great unwashed.

Fiction is an expressionist painting rather than a photograph.

I've always felt that the basic unit of writing fiction is the sentence, and the basic unit of the screenplay is the scene.

Good fiction necessarily encompasses our limited understandings of one another, and of ourselves.

Fiction, on the other hand, is like swamp fire.

I think it's what fiction is for: to illuminate that gap between our secret selves and our more visible and apparent ones.

The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.

I feel a terrible loss when I (eventually must) complete a work of fiction.

I don't see much difference between prose poems and flash fiction (I've often taught the latter as the former), but then I also don't see that much difference between art and poetry.

I like to read fiction best and I like to write fiction, too.

History is a novel which did take place; a novel is history that could take place.

Most fiction series are written so that the reader can come in at any point and not feel lost, but if you can start at the beginning, why not?

The biggest challenge of my career, which is something that authors of genre fiction face all the time, is writing something fresh and new and at the same time meeting reader expectations.

But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.

One of the great injustices in fiction is that on the whole people with romantic yearnings have romantic faces. But in real life it's not always like that.

On an average day, we allow ourselves the fiction that we own a piece of our workplace. That's part of what it takes to get the job done. Deeper down, we know it's all on loan.

[The Women's Room] is one of those pieces of fiction that reveals itself in a different way every time. It's incredible.

Somebody once said to me if you want to be understood, don't write fiction.

There is a lot of scepticism today as to whether memoir is real. But when fiction is done at a certain level there is scepticism as to whether it is really fiction.

I can remember when Pulp Fiction came out. I was, like, 10 years old. But I remember the impact that it had.

I am always interested in characters who are in these kinds of transitional moments in their lives, when it's not clear where they're going to end up. It's interesting territory for fiction.

Corporations are not legal "persons" with constitutional rights and freedoms of their own, but legal fictions that we created and must therefore control.

In the first 27 years of my life, I never had written a single non-technical word. I went to engineering college and went to business school. I never knew I could write fiction of any form.

And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.

Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.

Topiary has always seemed like a good occupation, comparable in some ways to writing short fiction.