Famous Quotes & Sayings

Brandon Sanderson

I am a writer who works from an outline. What I generally do when I build an outline is I find focal, important scenes, and I build them in my head and I don't write them yet, but I build towards them.

Ben Mezrich

There's always going to be controversy when you write the way I write.

Ben Marcus

When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.

Ben Okri

The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it's about us, it's about the reader.

Barbara Kingsolver

I know I have to write about the things that keep me awake at night.

Barbara Kingsolver

If you're writing, you're a writer. If you're talking about it or thinking about it, I'm not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight percent work and two percent magic.

Barbara Kingsolver

There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.

Barbara Pym

I imagine the proverb about too many cooks spoiling the broth can be applied to writing as well as anything else. The poetical or literary broth is better cooked by one person.

Barbara Pym

Novel writing is a kind of private pleasure, even if nothing comes of it in worldly terms.

Brandon Marshall

I try to live by the principles the Bible speaks on.

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, Bastille. I keep trying to get killed because it's inconvenient for you.

Brad Paisley

I changed my mindset and figured, Why not try to be really entertaining instrumentally?

Brad Feld

While I'm a venture capitalist who invests in early-stage tech companies, I often feel like a professional emailer and conference call maker. I try to spend most of my time doing whatever the companies we are investors in need me to do.

Jane Jacobs

It is hopeless to try to convert some borders into seams.

Jane Hirshfield

Zen taught me how to pay attention, how to delve, how to question and enter, how to stay with -- or at least want to try to stay with -- whatever is going on.

Cameron Diaz

I haven't been worried about my image so much as I have been trying to find projects to push myself further than before.

C. S. Lewis

You never know what you can do until you try, and very few try unless they have to.

Alan Dundes

In my introductory course, Anthropology 160, the Forms of Folklore, I try to show the students what the major and minor genres of folklore are, and how they can be analyzed.

Arthur C. Clarke

But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.

Anton Chekhov

The aim of fiction is absolute and honest truth.

Denis Diderot

How easy it is to tell tales!

Abraham Verghese

Medicine, you see, is my first love; whether I write fiction or nonfiction, and even when it has nothing to do with medicine, it's still about medicine. After all, what is medicine but life plus? So I write about life.

Doris Lessing

What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.

Michael Connelly

What I do now is I write fiction. I ground my fiction in the reality of a place called Los Angeles.

Alfred Hitchcock

In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is a God; he must create life.

Alvin Toffler

Science fiction is the sovereign prophylactic against future shock.

Raymond Carver

Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.