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 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.

Augusten Burroughs

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.

Benito Mussolini

Fascism is a religion. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism.

Dennis Farina

I love England and the historical aspect of it.

Sandra Sanchez

Though she was always working on her historical thing.

Joe Garcia

What can you say? It's been a historical winter that wasn't.

Andrew Sullivan

Is it not a rather fantastic historical irony that the torture techniques that the North Vietnamese used against McCain that forced him to offer a videotaped false confession... are now the techniques the Bush administration is using to gain "intelligence" about terror networks. How is it possible to know that everything John McCain once said on videotape for the enemy was false, because it was coerced, and yet assert that everything we torture out of terror suspects using exactly the same techniques, is true?

Daniel Day-Lewis

Quite honestly, if I were doing work related to a living being or historical being where there was visual or audio recordings available, I would find that extremely difficult because I don't know how you would avoid the process of mimicry. And mimicry, to me at any rate, is a very dull prospect.

Rick Perlstein

No historical analogies are exactly precise.

Steven Biko

The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

Stefan Zweig

A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.

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.

Richard Attenborough

I don't read a great deal of fiction, to my shame, other than the classics.