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.

Barbara Kingsolver

For scientists, reality is not optional.

Baruch Spinoza

Reality and perfection are synonymous.

Azar Nafisi

What we search for in fiction is not so much reality, but the epiphany of truth.

Azar Nafisi

Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies.

Ayn Rand

You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island - it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today - and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves; reality will show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.

Brian Bosworth

You see 'awesome' and I see 'lost.' It's very easy to lose touch with reality when you've got that many people thinking you are more than you really are.

Boyd Rice

Nature is typified by strength; humanity by weakness. Nature adheres to an immutable order; humanity to an ever-increasing chaos. Nature recognizes no equality at any level of it's order; humanity preaches an all-prevasive equality and freely hands-out unearned "rights" in an attempt to make its doctrine a living reality. In short: humanity is Democratic, nature is Fascist.

Jane Fonda

feminism is about ultimate, limitless reality ...

Jamie Foxx

We can't wave a magic wand and get rid of any of these people's problems, but what they want is they want to be heard.

Barbara Pym

She had always been an unashamed reader of novels ...

Jane Smiley

Novelists never have to footnote.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I've heard.

Michel Faber

All my novels are about people who strive to heal and evolve.

Amos Oz

Almost without exception, my novels are rooted in Israel because that's the place I know well.

Tom Perrotta

The lesson you have to learn as novelist is how to be collaborative, and how to say, "I don't get to dictate this."

Philip Larkin

If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'

Frank Norris

The function of the novelist... is to comment upon life as he sees it.

Jessica Savitch

Being a novelty had its advantages.