Urban Fiction Authors Quotes

What I've learned is, what people want is to tell someone, anyone, their problems. ~ Danila Botha

He should make you smile...always...and when he makes you cry it should be out of passion! ‪ ~ Brooklyn June

Regrets, it seems, are easy to realise when you're dying. ~ G.M.T. Schuilling

From 1929 to 1933, [age 25-29] I lived almost continuously in Berlin, with only occasional visits to other parts of Germany and to England. Already, during that time, I had made up my mind that I would one day write about the people I'd met and the experiences I was having. So I kept a detailed diary, which in due course provided raw material for all my Berlin stories. [from preface] ~ Christopher Isherwood

Too many poets are insufficiently interested in story. Their poems could be improved if they gave in more to the strictures of fiction: the establishment of a clear dramatic situation, and a greater awareness that first-person narrators are also characters and must be treated as such by their authors. The true lyric poet, of course, is exempt from this. But many poets wrongly think they are lyric poets. ~ Stephen Dunn

Although erotica authors are being targeted, this is an issue that should concern all indie authors. It affects indies disproportionately because indies are the ones pushing the boundaries of fiction. Indies are the ones out there publishing without the (fading) protective patina of a "traditional publisher" to lend them legitimacy. We indies only have each other. ~ Mark Coker

And that was the thing, wasn't it? When life rode on its highs, you wanted it to go on forever. But in the depths of the invariable dives, you'd be happy to be put out of your misery, because whatever awaited beyond this life had to be better than this shit on Earth. ~ G.M.T. Schuilling

Our Voice is our most powerful tool against these evil people who prey on the innocent, we should never be silent and let them continue to harm people. By being silent we are telling them it is "Okay to continue". I firmly believe if you choose to stand with those who wish to keep the victim silent you are yourself guilty of a crime against humanity
- Misty Griffin ~ Misty Griffin

Keep The Drama In Your Books, Not Your Life." - The Cartel Publications. ~ T. Styles

You're not safe with me."
He cut me off, seeming to growl. "I don't want to be safe. I want to be with you. You can't do this alone. ~ S.G. Holster

[Author's Note:] When my grandmother came to the United States from Puerto Rico in the 1940s, she was a beautiful, glamorous woman from a wealthy family in the capital city, and the young bride of a dashing naval officer. She expected to be received as such. Instead, she found that people here had a very reductionist view of what it meant to be Puerto Rican, of what it meant to be Latinx. Everything about her confused her new neighbors: her skin tone, her hair, her accent, her notions. She wasn't what they expected a boricua to be.

My grandmother spent much of her adult life in the States but didn't always feel welcome here. She resented the perpetual gringo misconceptions about her. She never got past that resentment, and the echoes of her indignation still have some peculiar manifestations in my family today. One of the symptoms is me. Always raging against a perceived slight, always fighting against ignorance in mainstream ideas about ethnicity and culture. I'm acutely aware that the people coming to our southern border are not one faceless brown mass but singular individuals, with stories and backgrounds and reasons for coming that are unique. I feel this awareness in my spine, in my DNA.

So I hoped to present one of those unique personal stories - a work of fiction - as a way to honor the hundreds of thousands of stories we may never get to hear. And in so doing, I hope to create a pause where the reader may begin to individuate. When we see migrant ~ Jeanine Cummins

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental. ~ Shannon Hale

It's common knowledge in the industry that people often lie, or minimize things, when they participate in surveys, No one wants to tell a stranger they drink four cocktails a night, or eat junk food for every meal. It's the same with their views on candidates and political issues. Most people won't tell you they don't like someone when they have to look you in the eye. None of that would matter for me, though, because I would know their true emotions whether they shared them or not. ~ Evette Davis

I'd said to them that when we read fiction, we pour our own paricular store of emotions - say, the sense of loss we feel for those disappeared from our lives - into the characters set before us. We take the few words with which the writer sketches these characters, the thing he said, the pain she felt, where they were, and our own emotional stockpile magically creates people. As the human eye fleshes out the pixilated image. Fictional characters are highly sophiticated Rorschach blots, and we, along with their author, are their authors. When you read a fictional character, you too are creating her. ~ Chandler Burr

My father and I used to watch a ton of old horror movies when I was growing up. 'The Creature from the Black Lagoon' was one of my father's favorites and he was very excited for me to see the film. But after the movie was over, I told him that I was kind of bored. I said to him, 'I'm sorry, Daddy, but I saw the zipper in the back of the monster's costume. From that point on, I was really never scared at all. The point I'm trying to make is that I don't believe someone intentionally tipped off the target. And I maintain that no one made some horrendous mistake, which I'm now trying to cover up. I believe what really happened with the operation was that our target ended up seeing the zipper. Orlo Kharms realized something around him wasn't… real. And he was able to avoid the trap we had laid out for him. ~ Richard Finney

Writing romantic fiction is the second chance that loved ones denied us. ~ Shannon L. Alder

We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development - part of what distinguishes the "modern" from the "early modern" - has shaped the work of many of our most celebrated authors, whose personal experiences indelibly and visibly mark their writing. It's fair to say that the fiction and poetry of many of the finest writers of the past century or so - and I'm thinking here of Conrad, Proust, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Plath, Ellison, Lowell, Sexton, Roth, and Coetzee, to name but a few - have been deeply autobiographical. The link between the life and the work is one of the things we're curious about and look for when we pick up the latest book by a favorite author. ~ James Shapiro

She would keep playing the role of the winner as long as the audience believed her. ~ Mary Papas

Where evil walks, hell follows. ~ Asa Swift

For anyone with a library in their head and love in their heart, ~ Kevin Ansbro

We need to talk," he insisted, opening the door to his jeep that was parked next to my car. I was still holding out hope this would end and I would see his smile soon.
"What's wrong?" I retaliated before I go in.
"There's something you need to know, something I haven't told you," he said, taking my backpack from me. ~ S.G. Holster

You will have noticed that I didn't give this story a pat conclusion, and that's deliberate. Katherine (my wife and frequent coauthor, K. A. Applegate) and I were among the earliest authors to encounter fan fiction via the internet. We've embraced it from the start. And some part of me hopes that fanfic writers will carry this story forward. Don't ask me what happens to these characters next, because I don't know. Will Dekka find love, perhaps with Simone? Will Cruz and Armo? How will Sam and Astrid do in this terrifying extension of earlier trauma? Maybe you have some ideas. I built the sandbox; if you want to bring your pails and shovels and play in it, cool. It's one of the best things about writing for young people: you are my collaborators in imagination. If I leave blanks it's because I know you'll fill them. ~ Michael Grant

Every writer dreams about the day they can step into their fiction and wander its hallways. ~ Shannon L. Alder

Paranormal fiction offers authors - and readers - the chance to answer the question, 'What if?' All the different ways that question can be answered make for extremely entertaining reading. ~ Jeaniene Frost

Changing imagination into fiction is what I love to do. ~ Eveli Acosta

I like certain subgenres within science fiction and fantasy, and one of those is urban fantasy, and another is steampunk. ~ Gail Carriger

I knew that the languages which one learns there are necessary to understand the works of the ancients; and that the delicacy of fiction enlivens the mind; that famous deeds of history ennoble it and, if read with understanding, aid in maturing one's judgment; that the reading of all the great books is like conversing with the best people of earlier times; it is even studied conversation in which the authors show us only the best of their thoughts; that eloquence has incomparable powers and beauties; that poetry has enchanting delicacy and sweetness; that mathematics has very subtle processes which can serve as much to satisfy the inquiring mind as to aid all the arts and diminish man's labor; that treatises on morals contain very useful teachings and exhortations to virtue; that theology teaches us how to go to heaven; that philosophy teaches us to talk with appearance of truth about things, and to make ourselves admired by the less learned; that law, medicine, and the other sciences bring honors and wealth to those who pursue them; and finally, that it is desirable to have examined all of them, even to the most superstitious and false in order to recognize their real worth and avoid being deceived thereby ~ Rene Descartes

Secret Saturdays ought to be required reading at middle schools everywhere. Maldonado gives us both voice and heart. His young characters navigate a challenging world with endearing earnestness, lively style, and a heartening desire for true friendship and dignity. ~ E.R. Frank

Last Victorian and Edwardian Britain saw a mega-change in reading habits. For the first time fiction took the primary place in book publishing, and the medium was taken up by briliant and entertaining authors with an agenda for 'a brave new world'. Such men as Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw were the opinion-makers for coming generations. 'With the next phase of Victorian fiction', wrote G. K. Chesterton, 'we enter a new world; the later, more revolutionary, more continental, freer but in some ways weker world in which we live today.'
Chesterton did not live to see the full consequences of the change but W. R. Inge predicted what was coming when he wrote:
No God. No country. No family. Refusal to serve in war. Free love. More play. Less work. No punishments. Go as you please. It is difficult to imagine any programme which, if carried out, would be more utterly ruinous to a country situated as Great Britain is today. ~ Iain H. Murray

The vibrant matte amethyst dial made the gleaming hour and minute markers seem to come alive. The long, thick hands were fragile, yet ceaselessly ticking by, like life itself. Countless hours must have been invested in the bezel, meticulously hashed all the way around. The tachymeter claimed prominence as if asserting that distance travelled over time should be of paramount importance. Never had the sheer pace and inevitability of time been better captured in an object. ~ G.M.T. Schuilling

Karma's not a bitch. She's a whore, acting like I've stolen her pimp. ~ G.M.T. Schuilling

I like to read fiction, and I particularly enjoy reading young adult fiction. But I also read children's books, adult books, current authors, and classics, but I like fiction the most. ~ James Howe

Far and away the greatest menace to the writer - any writer, beginning or otherwise - is the reader. The reader is, after all, a kind of silent partner in this whole business of writing, and a work of fiction is surely incomplete if it is never read. The reader is, in fact, the writer's only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side; all he has to do, after all, is shut his eyes, and any work of fiction becomes meaningless. Moreover, a reader has an advantage over a beginning writer in not being a beginning reader; before he takes up a story to read it, he can be presumed to have read everything from Shakespeare to Jack Kerouac. No matter whether he reads a story in manuscript as a great personal favor, or opens a magazine, or - kindest of all - goes into a bookstore and pays good money for a book, he is still an enemy to be defeated with any kind of dirty fighting that comes to the writer's mind. ~ Shirley Jackson

If you don't trust a novelist, who are you going to trust? ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Oh my God, cheese burn! ~ Susan Bischoff

The kernel of truth sank into the fertile soil of [her] imagination, possibilities for a happy resolution suggesting themselves in vague flashes of potential and promise... ~ Ana Chapman

If you could go back in time and redo one thing in your life, what would it be? ~ G.M.T. Schuilling

Thus far, I've devoted my entire career to publishing genre short fiction, but I now look forward to applying that same level of curation to finding the best new novels and new authors. ~ John Joseph Adams

it strikes me that the writers most deeply concerned with the state of literary fiction and its biases against women could do a lot worse than trying to coin some terms of their own: to name the archetypes they wish to invert or criticise and thereby open up the discussion. If authors can be thought of as magicians in any sense, then the root of our power has always rested with words: choosing them, arranging them and – most powerfully – inventing them. Sexism won't go away overnight, and nor will literary bias. But until then, if we're determined to invest ourselves in bringing about those changes, it only makes sense to arm ourselves with a language that we, and not our enemies, have chosen.

May 14, 2011 Blog post ~ Foz Meadows

I would say that most of my books are contemporary realistic fiction ... a couple, maybe three, fall into the 'historic fiction' category. Science fiction is not a favorite genre of mine, though I have greatly enjoyed some of the work of Ursula LeGuin. I haven't read much science fiction so I don't know other sci-fi authors. ~ Lois Lowry

I do tend to look at my books in many ways as conceptual fiction, even to the point where I think the author's photograph is part of the package. And I have gone out of my way to select the photograph to connect to the subject matter of each book. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible. ~ C.S. Lewis