Top 45 Fiction Writer Quotes

Part of being a fiction writer is being able to imagine how someone else is thinking and feeling. I think I’ve always been good at that.

Both of my parents were journalists, and my rebellion, such as it was, was to become a fiction writer.

I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face.

Poetry was my dirty little secret when I was a fiction writer at Iowa, and then fiction became my dirty little secret when I started writing more poetry and working for ‘Rookie’.

When I’m identified as a fiction writer at parties, the question comes pretty quickly. ‘Did you go to school for it?’ someone asks. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Where?’ they ask, because I don’t usually offer it. ‘I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,’ I say.

I read widely – for news, the arts, science, for entertainment, and the value of being informed – and, as a fiction writer, I can’t help transposing what I learn into the scenario for a novel or story.

I love historical fiction because there’s a literal truth, and there’s an emotional truth, and what the fiction writer tries to create is that emotional truth.

The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.

I had liver disease. I’m completely cured now, but I thought about if I died from liver cancer, what my life would look like. I followed this wish of being a fiction writer.

The training of a journalist, of working with words for thousands of hours, is extraordinarily useful for a fiction writer.

I do understand my limitations as a fiction writer, which is why my novels are always going to be close to home.

I was kind of broke . ‘The Girl on the Train’ was a last roll of the dice for me as a fiction writer.

Usually, as a fiction writer, you get e-mails saying, ‘I liked your book,’ or ‘I didn’t like it.’ You don’t get something saying, ‘I’m really glad this is in the world.’

I’ve read science fiction my whole life. I never really dreamed that I’d be a published science fiction writer myself, but a short story I started years ago sort of demanded to be turned into a novel.

I came to the conclusion that I am not a fiction writer.

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

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

My primary ambition is to be a fiction writer… Being a critic wasn’t an aspiration of mine.

There must be a dozen films now based on Philip K. Dick novels or stories, far more than any other published science fiction writer. He’s sort of become the go-to guy for weird science fiction notions.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

Being a fiction writer makes you someone who works with irresponsibility.

I don’t believe a poet has a better hold on truth or morality than a fiction writer has. And I don’t think a fiction writer has anything over a journalist. It’s all about the good word, properly inserted.

The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.

Prose is admittedly an art rooted in social intercourse, and a fiction writer is faster to find a common denominator with his cell mates than a poet is.

No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don’t confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.

We want a world with both historians and novelists, don’t we? Not with one or the other. Every fiction writer crosses the line that divides artistry and documentation – or erases it.

You can’t be a 21st-century science fiction writer writing about Mars without doing tips of the hat to Edgar Rice Burroughs, to Ray Bradbury, to H.G. Wells, to the guys who first put it in the public imagination that Mars was an exciting place.

And then I met Jerry and he’s such a creative fiction writer, and I don’t know if there’s ever been a team put together the way we are – where one person does the theological way out and suggestions, and the other person goes into the cave and does the fiction writing.

A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it’s not as satisfying in the end.

As a fiction writer, all I need is a laptop, and when I’m not teaching, I travel as much as I can, applying for every research grant and overseas gig I hear of, then trying to extend those trips as far as the stipends will go. I love to travel alone.

When I think about myself as a writer, for sure I am a science fiction writer. The tools of extrapolation, the tools of anticipating the future – those are science fictional questions.

I’m a fiction writer, and I do write essays, but I am not a poet. And I absolutely reject the phrase ‘woman writer’ as anti-feminist. I wrote an essay about this as far back as 1977, at the height of the neo-feminist movement.

As a science fiction writer, it’s hard to think of a more stirring theme than the origin and ultimate destiny of life in the universe.

There are autobiographical elements to the albums, and when I write, I always reference my own life as well as other things, so I’m just like any novelist or any fiction writer who tells stories.

By the time I wrote my memoir, ‘Men We Reaped,’ I had been running from writing it for a long time. When the events in the book were happening, I knew I’d probably write about them one day. I didn’t want to. I’d studied fiction, and I was committed to establishing myself as a fiction writer first.

I think the one thing that’s changed over time is that I’ve come to realise, as a fiction writer, the fact that I don’t think it will work out, doesn’t mean that it actually won’t.

Historical fiction is actually good preparation for reading SF. Both the historical novelist and the science fiction writer are writing about worlds unlike our own.

I started out in graduate school to be a fiction writer. I thought I wanted to write short stories. I started writing poems at that point only because a friend of mine dared me to write a poem. And I took the dare because I was convinced that I couldn’t write a good poem… And then it actually wasn’t so bad.

I quickly learned that as a fiction writer, you need the sort of details a historian or a biographer would find extraneous or useful to provide context via a footnote.

Any fiction writer who assumes that a character is typical no doubt runs the risk of stumbling into cliche and stereotype.

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.

The best thing about being a fiction writer is that where the truth is inconvenient, I could veer away.

I think part of what I like about being a fiction writer is that I can inhabit something that’s beyond the limits of my own personality.

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

The two endorsements I’m most proud of come from Isabel Wilkerson and Toni Morrison. The latter is the greatest American fiction writer of our time, and the former is on her way to being the greatest American nonfiction writer of our time.