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 Mertz

I have no writing habit. I work when I feel like it, and I work when I have to - mostly the latter.

Augustus

We write our names in the sand: and then the waves roll in and wash them away.

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.

Raymond Carver

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

Stephen Hawking

Science fiction can be exciting and very gripping, but it doesn't tell us anything about the universe in which we live.

Jason Katims

Any show I'm working on, I want the stories to always be about something, and to have the potential to be emotional. That's the kind of story that I like.

Brett Ratner

I'm not tied to budgets. I'm tied to the story that I want to tell, and how much it's going to cost is up to whatever the economic situation of the studio is.

Brad Meltzer

Stories aren't the beauty of what did happen. They're the beauty of what could happen.

C. S. Lewis

The birth of Christ is the central event in the history of the earth-- the very thing the whole story has been about.

Burt Reynolds

All you really have in the end are your stories.

Alan Dean Foster

How much research I have to do depends on the nature of the story. For fantasy, none at all.

Charles Colson

The first 20 stories written about a public figure set the tone for the next 2,000 and it is almost impossible to reverse it.

Bela Lugosi

I'll take any story if it's good.

Elizabeth Strout

All these lives," she said. "All the stories we never know." (125)