Fictional Writers Quotes

Look seeker, if you love a character, you give them pain, ruin their lives, make them suffer. Maybe even throw in a heroic death! ~ Varric Tethras

There's power in stories, though. That's all history is: the best tales. The ones that last. Might as well be mine. ~ Varric Tethras

They always tell you to do what you love. But they forget to add that writing doesn't pay by the hour. ~ Joyce Rachelle

If the decline of Christianity created the modern political zealot - and his crimes - so the evaporation of religious faith among the educated left a vacuum in the minds of Western intellectuals easily filled by secular superstition. There is no other explanation for the credulity with which scientists, accustomed to evaluating evidence, and writers, whose whole function was to study and criticize society, accepted the crudest Stalinist propaganda at its face value. They needed to believe; they wanted to be duped. ~ Paul Johnson

It is already the fashion to diminish Eliot by calling him derivative, the mouthpiece of Pound, and so forth; and yet if one wanted to understand the apocalypse of early modernism in its true complexity it would be Eliot, I fancy, who would demand one's closest attention. He was ready to rewrite the history of all that interested him in order to have past and present conform; he was a poet of apocalypse, of the last days and the renovation, the destruction of the earthly city as a chastisement of human presumption, but also of empire. Tradition, a word we especially associate with this modernist, is for him the continuity of imperial deposits; hence the importance in his thought of Virgil and Dante. He saw his age as a long transition through which the elect must live, redeeming the time. He had his demonic host, too; the word 'Jew' remained in lower case through all the editions of the poems until the last of his lifetime, the seventy-fifth birthday edition of 1963. He had a persistent nostalgia for closed, immobile hierarchical societies. If tradition is, as he said in After Strange Gods--though the work was suppressed--'the habitual actions, habits and customs' which represent the kinship 'of the same people living in the same place' it is clear that Jews do not have it, but also that practically nobody now does. It is a fiction, a fiction cousin to a myth which had its effect in more practical politics. In extenuation it might be said that these writers felt, as Sartre fe ~ Frank Kermode

Writers, because they write, are condemned never to be readers of their own stories ... The memory of first putting a story into words will always prevent writers from reading their work as an ordinary reader would. ~ Elena Ferrante

CUSTOMER: Hi, I just wanted to ask: did Anne Frank ever write a sequel?
BOOKSELLER: ........
CUSTOMER: I really enjoyed her first book.
BOOKSELLER: Her diary?
CUSTOMER: Yes, the diary.
BOOKSELLER: Her diary wasn't fictional.
CUSTOMER: Really?
BOOKSELLER: Yes... She really dies at the end – that's why the diary finishes. She was taken to a concentration camp.
CUSTOMER: Oh... that's terrible.
BOOKSELLER: Yes, it was awful -
CUSTOMER: I mean, it's such a shame, you know? She was such a good writer. ~ Jen Campbell

Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society he lives in, and sometimes, like Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut or Leo Tolstoy or Francois Rabelais, a very harsh critic indeed. The others are sycophants, courtiers, servitors, entertainers. Shakespeare was a sychophant; however, he was and is also a very good poet, and so we continue to read him. ~ Edward Abbey

It comes a point in which you don't know if you write books or the books write you ~ Robin Sacredfire

Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world. ~ Ariel Gore

Will they not for their part have monkeys and marmosets to make them fine coats and doublets of leather and iron? Hands would not be a problem, for the monkeys could work with their hands, and so they would in no way be inferior to man; they could even be writers. They would never be so feeble as not to put their heads together to find ways of resisting these arms, and they would construct machines of their own with which they would inflict great harm on men. ~ Jean De Meun

Writers do not write about a place because they belong there, but because they want to. ~ Tony Earley

But a writer's contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that's what being a director is. ~ Taylor Hackford

Practically all writers and artists are aware of their destiny and see themselves as actors in a fateful drama. With me, nothing is momentous: obscure youth, glorious old age, fateful coincidences - nothing really matters. I have written a number of good sentences. I have kept free of delusions. I know I am going to die soon. ~ Eric Hoffer

The modern writers who have suggested, in a more or less open manner, that the family is a bad institution, have generally confined themselves to suggesting, with much sharpness, bitterness, or pathos, that perhaps the family is not always very congenial. Of course the family is a good institution because it is uncongenial. It is wholesome precisely because it contains so many divergencies and varieties. It is, as the sentimentalists say, like a little kingdom, and, like most other little kingdoms, is generally in a state of something resembling anarchy. ~ G.K. Chesterton

What really resonated with my students, I think, is that most of the writers we worked with were journalists, and when they saw journalists simply raising questions and being put in jail for that, it did freak them out a little bit. ~ Adam Braver

I like the hip writers: Fitzgerald, the guy who committed suicide, Hemingway, all those guys. Some of them were alcoholics and drug addicts but they had fun. They were real people. They formed the culture of American literature. Hemingway admired Tolstoy, Tolstoy admired Pushkin, and Mailer admired Hemingway. It all flows down. The greats are all connected. One day I'm gonna write a book myself. The first chapter will be about what a rough deal my momma got. She believed in you guys and your society. ~ Mike Tyson

Come writers and critics Who prophesize with your pen And keep your eyes wide The chance won't come again And don't speak too soon For the wheel's still in spin And there's no tellin' who That it's namin' For the loser now Will be later to win For the times they are a-changin'. ~ Bob Dylan

Writers and scholars have emerged in recent times (some familiar, some new) to continue to challenge the notion of a literature that encompasses the world - and reaffirms our existence in it. It is a multicultural vision that embraces and includes our shrinking universe; it is a multicultural vision that the white man fears and a vision that the rest of us can celebrate. ~ Jessica Hagedorn

Even in a crowded field, it is a rare pleasure to come across a prose stylist like Kellie Wells, whose intellect and language bid one another beautifully to a dance. She dares to be at play in the most unsettling questions of her day. Surely when the present generation of writers shakes down to its unique and irreplaceable voices, Kellie Wells will be one of them. ~ Jaimy Gordon

Milch had a bigger cast, a bigger set (on the Melody Ranch studio, where Gene Autry had filmed very different Westerns decades earlier), and more creative freedom than he'd ever had before. There were no advertisers to answer to, and HBO was far more hands-off than the executives at NBC or ABC had been. And as a result, there was even less pretense of planning than there had been on NYPD Blue, and more improvisation. There were scripts for the first four episodes of Season 1, and after that, most of the series was written on the fly, with the cast and crew often not learning what they would be doing until the day before (if that). As Jody Worth recalls, the Deadwood writers would gather each morning for a long conversation: "We would talk about where we were going in the episode, and a lot of talk that had nothing to do with anything, a lot of Professor Milch talk, all over the map talk, which I enjoyed." Out of those daily conversations came the decisions on what scenes to write that day, to be filmed the day after. There was no system to it, no order, and the actors would be given scenes completely out of context from the rest of the episode. ~ Alan Sepinwall

Like most writers, I've read a lot of Hemingway, and I admire him greatly. ~ Rachel Kushner

It's all about who's where on the food chain. When I'm the story editor, I expect my writers to follow my vision. When I'm working for another editor, I'm obliged to follow their vision. ~ Len Wein

We had good long talks about my writing in the days that followed. "Write of things you know, Julie; familiar, simple things that you have experienced; things that have touched you deeply."
"But nothing's ever happened to me. I've just lived here with Aunt Cordelia and you most of my life, I've gone to school, visited Father
oh, sure, I'm in love with Danny, but that's something we've grown into
very wonderful for us, but not very exciting for the rest of the world. How can a person who has lived as quiet a life as I have find anything to write about?"
"Then you do have a problem. If you haven't lived long enough to have felt anything deeply, than you are in the same position I
as many would-be writers are. You've nothing to say. So take up crocheting. ~ Irene Hunt

A handwritten letter carries a lot of risk. It's a one-sided conversation that reveals the truth of the writer. Furthermore, the writer is not there to see the reaction of the person he writes to, so there's a great unknown to the process that requires a leap of faith. The writer has to choose the right words to express his sentences, and then, once he has sealed the envelope, he has to place those thoughts in the hands of someone else, trusting that the feelings will be delivered, and that the recipient will understand the writer's intent. How childish to think that could be easy. ~ Adriana Trigiani

Short story writers simply do what human beings have always done. They write stories because they have to; because they cannot rest until they have tried as hard as they can to write the stories. They cannot rest because they are human, and all of us need to speak into the silence of mortality, to interrupt and ever so briefly stop that quiet flow, and with stories try to understand at least some of it. ~ Andre Dubus

Writers need their writing; they need their imaginary worlds in order to find piece in, or make sense of, the real world. ~ Terry Brooks

Good writers show rather than tell. Stories are told in action. Life stories are no different. ~ Donald Miller

Fiction writers are strange beasts. They are, like all writers, observers first and foremost. Everything that happens to and around them is potential material for a story, and they look at it that way. ~ Terry Brooks

The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief. Yet so natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really care about, that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realised, except where religious indifference, which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, has added its weight to the scale. ~ John Stuart Mill

A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to. ~ Tom Bissell

I don't see myself as some kind of lone figure standing out there and doing my work in solitary splendour, but as part of the human condition and part of the continuum of writers. ~ Jeanette Winterson

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

Canadian writers don't live in gated mansions; you can just talk to them when you see them lining up at the Second Cup. ~ Russell Smith

If I waited for perfection ... I would never write a word. ~ Margaret Atwood

Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there. ~ Robert Morgan

When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you. ~ Connie Willis

It is no wonder that the writers of the nineteenth century look upon society as an artificial creation of the legislator's genius. This idea
the fruit of classical education
has taken possession of all the intellectuals and famous writers of our country. To these intellectuals and writers, the relationship between persons and the legislator appears to be the same as the relationship between the clay and the potter. ~ Frederic Bastiat

There is a sort of half-formed thoughts, which we sometimes find writers impatient to give to the world, before they themselves are fully possessed of them. Now, if the writer himself perceive confusedly and imperfectly the sentiments he would communicate, it is a thousand to one, the reader will not perceive them at all. ~ George Campbell

I think Star Trek has been very double-edged for all of us - as actors, writers, directors. ~ Jonathan Frakes