182 Quotes About Fiction-writing

Now you might remember the professor on the television show Gilligan’s Island. A really smart guy. He powered the island, developed a coconut clock, installed a plumbing and water system. He just never got around to fixing the boat. Brian was effective in just the same way.

It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.

The writer who position is Christian, and probably also the writer whose position is not, will begin to wonder at this point if there could not be some ugly correlation between our unparalleled prosperity and the stridency of these demands for a literature that shows us the joy of life. He may at least be permitted to ask if these screams for joy would be quite so piercing if joy were really more abundant in our prosperous society.

That's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.

Pomposity plans your eviction just as your derriere is settling on to the finest of cushions.

The story of how I threw up over John Lennon’s Beatle boots is worth telling.

At that moment, I had apparently signed a contract in blood. We all know the power of spoken words; well, they are as powerful as a signature...

Fiction is a careful combination of observation, inspiration, and imagination.

She had never seen anything so terrifyingly beautiful, and as she watched the sunlight glint off its body, a shimmering movement of yellow and black, she remembered what her mother had told her.