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

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.

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.

Augusten Burroughs

My only ritual is to just sit down and write, write every day.

Augusten Burroughs

I don't have a fixed routine. I write every day but I don't "write" every day, if that makes any sense. In other words, I email with my friends constantly and sometimes I'll pull out something I've written and save it.

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.

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.

Ray Bradbury

There's a lot of crap out there. Most of the science fiction films alone are abominations, you know. They're mindless. So you can't learn from those kinds of films.

Siri Hustvedt

I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.